THE CROSS vs. THE SWORD
(July 25)
“Then they came and laid hands on Jesus and took Him. And suddenly, one of those who were with Jesus stretched out his hand and drew his sword, struck the servant of the high priest, and cut off his ear. But Jesus said to him, ‘Put your sword in its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Or do you think that I cannot now pray to My Father, and He will provide Me with more than twelve legions of angels? How then could the Scriptures be fulfilled, that it must happen thus?’” (Mt 26: 50-54)
Jesus could have escaped His arrest, with or without the help of “more than twelve legions of angels.” But that wasn’t God’s plan, as manifested in “the Scriptures,” which speak of His vocation, – and our vocation, when we follow Him, – as being that of the Way of the Cross, which is the only way that leads to new life. The Old Testament Scriptures abound with images that prefigure the mystery of the Cross, of new life coming from death, beginning with “the third day” of creation (Gen 1: 11-13), on which God created the plants and their seed, which spring forth to new life after they “fall to the ground and die.”
When our vocation involves a certain “death,” not necessarily as dramatic as the one endured by our Lord on the Cross, but one that involves some form of us “falling (to the ground)” and “dying” to the self, – to the self we were before that “fall,” – let us not take up our little sword and become the aggressors against the people that (like the servant of the high priest in the passage quoted above) were our aggressors. It might be our ex-wife or ex-husband, or ex-boss or ex-friend. Let us rather walk forward, to the new life that God intends for us, not through aggression, through which we ultimately hurt ourselves, but through truth. I don’t mean rolling over and playing dead before our aggressors, but being truthful to ourselves and them, as Christ was before Pilate. He let Pilate be Pilate, but did testify that it was God Who gave Pilate the power to be who he was in that moment: “You could have no power at all against Me unless it had been given you from above.” (Jn 19: 11)
But Pilate’s power did not extend beyond the tomb. So, let me not fear the “death” to which God might lead me, on this cross-carrying journey of my vocation, because God can and does bring me new life beyond all the “tombs” of merely-human rejections and failures, through which I can spring up to new life and grow, if I choose to do so, in communion with our death-trampling Lord. “I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord!” (Ps 118: 17)
