GOSPEL OF ST. MARK, 2, 18-22 THE BRIDEGROOM & FASTING - PART 4
 | The joy of loving Jesus is these apparent paradoxes of suffering and healing, of discipline and freedom, of mortification and spiritual resurrection. “…this crucifixion of oneself - self-denial - leads to a great inner joy, to ‘resurrection’. The more I dare lose myself, the more I discover it is precisely in this way that I find myself.”14 Jesus asks me: “’Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?’” I gather courage and confidence seeing the earnestness on the faces of the Sons of Zebedee, to whom He had characteristically answered their petition with another question, “And they said to Him, ‘We are able.’” (Mk 10, 38-39). |
So during this Lenten season I accompany the Bridegroom profoundly aware that He was sent by the Father to expiate my sins and the sins of humanity especially through His passion and death on the cross. “It was the will of the Lord to bruise him; he has put him to grief; when he makes himself an offering for sin…the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand; he shall see the fruit of the travail of his soul and be satisfied…” (Is 53, 10-11). Once again, the agony and the ecstasy; mourning the tortures He underwent for me and fasting in His absence yet rejoicing because He is the Risen Bridegroom who lovingly embraced death for me and bestows on me new life: “that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” (Jn 15, 11)
14 TO LOOK ON CHRIST, EXERCISES IN FAITH, HOPE AND LOVE, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, St. Paul Publications, English tr. 1991, pgs. 95-96.
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