7 March 2019
Thursday after Ash Wednesday
Jesus speaks to His disciples of His impending suffering and death, something we ourselves anticipate during this Lenten season, but He adds to this foreshadowing an important decree: “If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”
Being a follower of Christ is more than what we leave behind; it is also about what lies ahead and if we are, truly, following Jesus then this means coming to the Cross. This means not only letting go of this or that, but even letting go of our own selves, denying ourselves so that Jesus may be everything we are. By embracing the Cross, rather than running from it or walking around it, we might be able to say, as St. Paul said to the Galatians “I have been crucified with Christ; yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me; insofar as I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who has loved me and given himself up for me” (Galatians 2:19-20). Jesus denied Himself, and gave Himself up for you; will you do the same for Him?
Today the Church remembers the great Saints Perpetua and Felicity, both of whom were martyred in Carthage around the year 203 AD. We have access to the diary Perpetua kept of her experience, and in it we read the story of a remarkable young woman who courageously stood against anything that sought to rob her of her faith in Jesus. She shares, for example, a vision she had in prayer, in which she saw a ladder that had various weapons and other dangers on it, but at the top was Heaven. She writes:
“And there was right at the ladder’s foot a serpent lying, marvelously great, which lay in wait for those that would go up, and frightened them that they might not go up…And I said: it shall not hurt me, in the name of Jesus Christ. And from beneath the ladder, as though it feared me, it softly put forth its head; and as though I trod on the first step I trod on its head.”
She realized that the Enemy was trying to rattle her confidence in Christ by all these threats to her body, and even by her friends and family begging her to renounce her faith to save her life. Even though these things appealed to her natural instincts, she denied herself and embraced the Cross set before her, and trod upon the Enemy’s head as her first step into a deeper union with God. When all her focus was on Jesus, she became utterly fearless; she saw the Cross not as an obstacle or a threat, but as a bridge, to an even greater life:
“But Perpetua, that she might have some taste of pain, was pierced between the bones and shrieked out; and when the swordsman’s hand wandered still (for he was a novice), herself set it upon her own neck. Perchance so great a woman could not else have been slain (being feared of the unclean spirit) had she not herself so willed it.”
Sts. Perpetua and Felicity, pray for us, that we may courageously and generously embrace our crosses, trusting that Jesus helps us to bear them. Amen.