Let us honor Jesus on the day of his death

Good Friday, Day 2 of the Triduum, April 15, 2022           

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Let us honor Jesus on the day of his death

Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.

Eleven days after Easter on April 11, 1945 at 3:15 in the afternoon, the United States Army liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp in Nazi Germany. Nine months earlier General George Patton had begun the Americans’ own blitzkrieg across Germany with the Third Army.

A Polish engineer, prisoner at Buchenwald, constructed a clever, secret radio. On April 8 he sent a message.

To the Allies. To the army of General Patton. This is the Buchenwald concentration camp. SOS. We request help. They want to evacuate us. The SS wants to destroy us.

He relayed the message over and over and over. Three minutes after the last transmission he received this message:

KZ Bu. Hold out. Rushing to your aid. Staff of Third Army.

The engineer fainted. Then he passed on what he had heard. The underground resistance at Buchenwald pulled out their few grenades and rifles, and prison guards and jailors fled. Two days later the Gestapo telephoned. “We are planning to blow up the camp and destroy any evidence of its existence, including its inmates.” But by that time, a resistor manned the phone. The Nazis were long gone.

“There is no need,” the prisoner said. “The camp has already been destroyed.” There were no explosives. And just a few hours later, the Americans arrived.

One of the saved 16 year-olds was Elie Wiesel, author of Night, 40 years later winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize. Mr. Wiesel ended his book with a look in the mirror.

I had not seen myself in a mirror since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me … has never left me.

I imagine Jesus’ there too, watching Elie, loving him, rescuing him, replacing him.

Oppressed and condemned, he was taken away, and who would have thought any more of his destiny? When he was cut off from the land of the living, smitten for the sin of his people, a grave was assigned him among the wicked. The Lord was pleased to crush him in infirmity.

155 miles south, at Flossenburg in Bavaria. On Sunday morning April 8, prisoner Dietrich Bonhoeffer dies on the gallows, days before the Third Army arrived to liberate that concentration camp. Out of those ashes and blood, one man lives, and another man dies. There is no telling. Only Jesus watching, and weeping.

He was spurned and avoided by people, a man of suffering, accustomed to infirmity, one of those from whom people hide their faces, spurned, and we held him in no esteem. Yet it was our infirmities that he bore, our sufferings that he endured. And the Lord laid upon him the guilt of us all.

This afternoon Margaret and I hope to walk the Stations of the Cross in a garden outside St. Thomas More Catholic Church in Austin. We’ll carry prayers to pray, aloud or silently. The altars inside will have been stripped bare, and at 3 pm the bells might toll, as Jesus collapses on the cross.

When Jesus had taken the wine, he said, “It is finished.” And bowing his head, he handed over the spirit.

What is truth? Pilate asked this as if words could satisfy the question. Jesus looked at him, said nothing. We are so foolish.

Jesus himself is truth. The way, the truth, the life. Jesus himself, the man. Ecce homo. I fall down on my knees, on my face, and worship.

We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way, yet without sin. Because of this God has bestowed on him the name which is above every other name. And every knee shall bow.

(Isaiah 52, Psalm 31, Hebrews 4, Philippians 2, John 18-19)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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