The following talk was given by the Rector – Father Anthony Percy – at iWitness Conference, on Thurs 3rd Dec 2009.

The Cross – Where all “roads” cross 

It is a deeply held tradition in the Church that whilst the way of Christ is narrow, there are, in fact, many narrow paths, ways or roads to him.

For example, Jacques Fesch, the French murderer, who experienced a profound conversion to Christ in prison before his execution, and whose cause for beatification is now before Rome, wrote before his death in 1957 these words:

The ways are numerous and varied, but the end is one. In the same way a mountain nine thousand feet in height, with a base fifty miles in circumference, has only one summit, yet there are hundreds of ways leading to it. Each one follows his own path and sees only what is within his range. If you climb up the northern side you can’t see the southern, but once the top is reached the same panorama stretches out before all. (Cf. Light Over The Scaffold: Prison Letters of Jacques Fesch and Cell 18: Unedited Letters of Jacques Fesch)

There are as many paths to God as there are people on earth. We are all unique and Christ understands this better than anyone. He respects our way of being – he really does. Equally true is his desire to bring us to fulfilment – to see us realize our potential. The narrow path is threefold – denial, shouldering the cross and walking behind Christ – not in front of him.

St. Mark puts it this way:

Jesus called the people and his disciples to him and said, ‘If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me. For anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake, and the sake of the gospel, will save it. (Mark 8, 34-35)

The desire to reach the ‘heights’ is a good thing, but few of us like the advice on how to get there. Self-denial, embracing the cross and following Jesus means change and change is difficult.

As I understand it, the ‘sea change’ that needs to take place is the movement away from ‘career’ to ‘vocation.’ That is, somehow as a young person, I have to come to terms with the fact that career is overrated. Choosing what ‘I’ want has some merit – I understand that. At your age, I was studying an honours degree in finance – and I loved it. But then a seemingly minor event took place that made me think differently. I began to think, what should I really do with my life? True, we have to get skills on board to put some food on the table. All of this is absolutely necessary. But it is not the only thing required. Jesus was more interested in Mary’s attitude, than Martha’s. (Cf. Luke 10, 38-42)

Truth always lies at a deeper level – at the personal level. It is at this level that we must dare to enter. We are called to make the journey within – to find our true selves in the intimacy of our hearts and to find the One who made us in his image and likeness.

When we make this bold move – to the centre of our being – we move beyond career to vocation.

Christ is the one who calls and it is he whom we find deep within. The calling is either to marriage, religious life, single celibate life (perhaps even consecrated life in the Church) or priestly life. Which is the best? – The one that the Lord calls you to – simple as that.

To begin to sense the call of Christ, to feel it, to think about the call, to will it, to be tantalized and even tormented by it, is the most wonderful thing that can happen to you. I recall those days in my early twenties when I felt the tug of Christ. I sensed that he was calling me in some way to himself, but didn’t know exactly how. Celibacy became clear at first and then the priestly call emerged with clarity. It was a time of great adventure, yet somehow disconcerting and bewildering. Was Christ really that interested in me being a priest? Like Jacob in the Old Testament, I felt I was wrestling or struggling with God. (Cf. Genesis 32, 23f)

As I look back at it now, I realise the fundamental difference between career and vocation. It is the difference between choosing what I wanted – a career in business – and letting myself be led – a vocation following Jesus of Nazareth. I can tell you, without hesitation, that following the call of Christ is an exciting adventure. He just leads you to places and spaces you would never of dreamed of.

At any rate, whatever God may be calling you to, the recipe is always the same: he is going to ask you to deny yourself, take up your cross and follow him.

Denying ourselves is not that hard. We do it all the time. Think, for instance, of people who go to the gym to get fit.  I met a middle-aged woman the other day who did a triathlon in just over ten hours – a 3km swim, 100km bike ride and a marathon. Life is replete with sacrifices. The real question is: are we making them for ourselves or for Christ?

The real issue we face is not self-denial, but the cross and the following of Christ. Who wants to carry a cross or follow someone who is not easily manifest? These are real questions, I would say, that any reasonable person would ask.

At face value the cross is the symbol of suffering and death. Could it get any worse for a crucified man? Historians tell us that a crucified man could remain on the cross for up to a week, His executioners would place a saddle behind his buttocks so that he could prop himself up and avoid dying from suffocation – this helped prolong the suffering. There he would hang for a week, often feeling the brunt of the hot sun during the day and the frost at night. We are told that he would yell and abuse those who came to mock him. He was a criminal and deserved abuse and belittling. He would react by returning abuse at his tormentors. At times people got sick of listening to their ranting at night and would come and cut their tongues out! That was easily achieved as they were often raised just above the ground.

It was this type of death that Jesus endured, although he died rather quickly since he was scourged before being nailed to the cross – a type of brutality that often killed the man there and then. Jesus died the death reserved for criminals and insurrectionists. He suffered terribly in the process. This process we call his passion.

That word passion alerts us to the real happening on the cross of Jesus. Jesus was, in fact, dying a death to sin and giving his life out of love for us. In his passion he demonstrated a clear passion for me – for you.

Think about your death for a moment. On the one hand, our death is a disaster. Our personal being is broken down completely – body and soul (and spirit) separate, something never intended by God at all. It is a moment of rupture, of division, of disintegration. Nothing could be more shocking. I am dying, dying, dying, … and I am dead!

On the other hand, our death will be the moment of truth – and grace – when everything is laid bare – when we are laid bare. Our life will somehow be summarized and symbolized by our death. That’s what happens at funerals – does it not? The dead person’s life is somehow made mysteriously present by that gathering of faithful who try to see the person’s life and death in and through the life and death of Jesus.

Death was introduced into the human race as a result of sin. St. Paul puts it rather neatly and precisely when he says, “that death is the wages of sin.” (Romans 6, 23)  The price paid for sin is death. Sin is doing my own thing – separating myself from God, from others and from my true self. Separated and cut off from the true source of my being I must surely die – and I do. And once death takes hold, sin gets a run on – at least until Someone decided to put death to death, and that is Christ.

It is Catholic teaching, firmly based on the Word of God, that Jesus died a death to sin and death. That is, his death is unique in history. He, and only he, died not a normal, natural death, but died carrying my sins and death in his entire being. Again, St. Paul teaches us in his second letter to the Corinthians that, “God caused the sinless one to be sin.” (2Cor 5, 21)

By embracing the suffering of the cross Jesus thereby identifies himself with all human suffering – especially intense forms of suffering. By becoming sin on the cross he forgives my sin. By becoming sin on the cross he embraces the mystery and destructive power of death and by his death he puts death to death – as many a Church Father taught.

All of this is completely true – suffering is embraced, sin is confronted and forgiven, death is defeated on its terms. Rather marvellous, don’t you think?!

And yet there is something even more mysterious about the Cross of Jesus:

Christ died with so much love on the cross that the resurrection was three quarters complete.

I heard those words from a biblical scholar, also a priest, in the United States some years ago during post-graduate study and they hit me in the midriff – and they still do.

Christ on the cross was not only bearing suffering, not only forgiving sin, not only destroying death, but he was renewing our humanity, once and for all, in the most powerful, yet gentle manner. He was – is – transforming what is most ugly, inexplicable, devastating and tragic in life, into something beautiful, mysterious, foundational and hopeful. Hatred was – is – being turned into love.

How else could we explain this account of the martyrdom of Maximilian Kolbe in 1941 in the Auschwitz concentration camp? Father Kolbe had been arrested by the Nazi’s in 1939, released some time after, but then imprisoned again for aiding Jewish refugees. “On 24 July 1941, one of the prisoners in the concentration camp escaped. As a result, in keeping with the practice followed there, ten men were selected at random to die of starvation in an empty bunker. One of these, named Franciszek Gajowniczek, a father of nine, wailed: ‘No, God! Not me, please! What will become of my poor wife and children?’ Deeply moved, Fr Kolbe stepped out of the ranks and standing before Commandant Fritsch, pointed to the father of nine and said: ‘I am a Catholic priest from Poland. I am old. I want to take his place because he has a wife and children.’” (From website, “Feastofallsaints.”)

I quote now from Robert Royal’s, The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century. The description is breathtaking.

Bruno Borgowiec, a Pole who served as interpreter and a kind of undertaker for the Starvation Bunker, has provided stunning accounts of what happened next. They were all ordered to strip naked before going into the bunker. … The guards shoved them into the dark hole, which already contained prisoners who had spent several days there. Borgowiec recalls a guard’s ominous threat: ”You will dry up like tulips!”

They all died, of course, but not quite like flowers that bloom one day and are gone the next. Thanks to Kolbe they died like men. Good men. As Borgowiec later described the astonishing change: “It doesn’t even seem like the Starvation Bunker … When I go down there, it’s like descending into the crypt of a church.” Kolbe had organised prayers among the men along with the singing of hymns and recitation of the rosary: “Sometimes they would be so absorbed in prayer that they would not even realise the guards had come for the daily inspection and had opened the door of their cell. Only when the SS began shouting at them would they stop praying.” It was as if, even in the darkness of an Auschwitz isolation cell, they were already living in another, better world.

Kolbe did all this and more, without complaint, all the way to his end in the Starvation Bunker. Even the guards noticed at the end. When they came for their daily inspection to remove the dead, they always found Kolbe either standing or kneeling in serenity. The others were usually sprawled in one place or another. One of the guards said in Borgowiec’s hearing: “That priest is a real man. We never had one like that here before.” In fact, the “real man” and three of his fellows wore out the patience of the guards. The cell was needed for other prisoners. So on August 14, 1941, the vigil of the Feast of the Assumption, they ordered Doctor Boch to inject the surviving men with carbolic acid. It was astonishing that they had all lasted two weeks without light, air, food, and water on top of the months of abuse in the camp, but even more so that the chronically ill Kolbe also survived.

He could no longer stand or kneel, and sat propped against the wall. Boch came in and injected the other three men. The poison worked quickly and within seconds they were dead. He turned to Kolbe, who was praying. Without interrupting his prayer, Kolbe offered his arm to the executioner. Borgowiec got so emotional at the sight that he made an excuse and went outside. When the doctor and the guards emerged, Borgowiec knew it was all over. Most of his account of Kolbe is quite sober, but even Borgowiec was moved to a kind of dark poetry by what he then saw: “When I opened the iron door, Father Kolbe was no longer alive. His face had an unusual radiance about it. The eyes were wide open and focused on some definite point. His entire person seemed to have been in a state of ecstasy. I will never forget that scene as long as I live.” (p. 194-197)

The accent here is not so much on suffering and sin, but on the gift of self, the laying down of one’s life for another, the grain of wheat falling to the ground, dying and bearing abundant fruit, greater love has no man then that he lay down his life for his friends. …

All of this is remarkable and beautiful. Surely it engages me at the deepest level of my being? The cross ceases to be a sign of punishment and suffering, but becomes a symbol of love and hope.

A career is nice, a good thing to pursue. Go for it. But remember, it wears thin. You will get sick of it if there is not another driving force – if you are not following him who died and rose out of love for you. A vocation – a calling – to deny oneself, take up the cross and follow Jesus is spectacular and splendid, lasting unto eternity. Your thirst will never be satisfied, because his being is infinite and the call is continual.

John Henry Newman (1801-1890) puts it more succinctly and with greater subtlety than most. He was a really great thinker, but a believer before all else. He will be beatified by Pope Benedict XVI next year:

All through our life Christ is calling us. He called us first in baptism, but afterwards also; whether we obey his voice or not, he graciously calls us still. If we fall from our baptism, he calls us to repent; if we are striving to fulfil our calling, he calls us on from grace to grace, and from holiness to holiness, while life is given to us. Abraham was called from his home, Peter from his nets, Matthew from his office, Elisha from his farm, Nathanael from his retreat; … He calls us again and again, in order to justify us again and again – and again and again, and more and more, to sanctify and glorify us. (Parochial and Plain Sermons 8, 23-25.31-32)

One final point: The Church teaches us that Christ’s mysterious suffering, death and resurrection is made present for us during the celebration of the Eucharist.

The Mass can be understood as having two fundamental moments or actions. The first is the Liturgy of the Word. This is where Christ speaks to us – heart to heart. A certain silence, composure, inner quietness is required here if there is to be any meaningful communication between him and us. For Christ really does want to speak with us in the most intimate of ways. We live not on bread alone, but from every word that comes from the mouth of God. (Cf. Matthew 4, 4) 

Don’t underestimate this part of the Mass. A word or perhaps a phrase that comes from Christ has power to change you there and then. This is part of the reason, for instance, why the Church underwent a liturgical renewal last century. The baptised simply had to have more easy and substantial access to the Word of God – which is the basis of everyone’s spiritual life.

Let me drive home this point again: the Liturgy of the Word is critical to Mass. It is where Christ speaks to you. Along with Samuel on the Old Testament we say, “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.” (1 Samuel 3, 1-22) We don’t come along with, “Listen, Lord, your servant is speaking!”

The Liturgy now moves to the Liturgy of the Eucharist – a Greek verb meaning, “to give thanks.” That’s exactly what Christ did before he died – he gave thanks during the Last Supper for all that had happened and all that was about to happen.

Incredibly, the Word that was spoken to you in the Liturgy of the Word is now made flesh. Some small, thin wafer breads are presented to the priest on behalf of the faithful, along with a few drops of wine. The bread and wine, of course, are symbolic of creation – of the Creator’s gifts and man’s transformation of them.

The Holy Spirit is invoked and the priest speaks the words of consecration – “This is my body given for you. This is my blood poured out for you.” The Church has always believed that the elements of bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. And by means of this consecratory action, Christ’s one, single sacrifice for sins is made present. In addition to this singular power, the event of Christ’s resurrection is made present.

That is, we go not by sight, but by faith. That is, although we don’t see Christ, we believe that he is truly present in his Body and Blood under the appearances of bread and wine. Christ is shrouded under the veil of the sacrament. He is really here now on the altar and then in your body as you receive Communion. Likewise, you cannot see the one sacrifice of Christ because it is a sacramental sacrifice. Nevertheless, Christ is entirely present with his Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity and his Death and Resurrection is now active and activated in you.

What more could you ask for? What more would you want? Of course, if Jesus is just some historical figure who did a bit of good, then, there is no need to worry. But if he is someone who died and rose for you and is your Lord and Master, then you will find this saving action and his soothing presence at Mass. What’s more, it is precisely at Mass that you will hear the call of Christ and discover the vocation that he is calling you to.

This mystery Jesus entrusted to the Church. And since we form the Church, I leave it in your hands, too.

Amen.