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    Christus trägt das Kreuz  (Ausschnitt) Jan Sanders van Hemessen (ca.1500-1575)

    Shared Hells

    A Lenten Meditation

    By Peter Kreeft

    February 21, 2018

    Available languages: español

    6 Comments
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    • Les Lucas

      I am so ignorant of Christ's suffering and his paradoxical drive, need and purpose to love me as I am. I stumble and fall more than not, and he still stays with me. He knows that my cross, what I call my "1000 lb. pack" is so slight. Yet there he is, showing me the way to validate in such imperfect and inadequate gestures that God made me, loves me, and he is going to stay with me through it all. I more often curse the 1000 lb. pack and my struggle to stand and walk with it. I seldom acknowledge his efforts to use me to keep going, to walk with others and their “1000 lb. packs”. I often get angry at myself for straying in my thoughts and walk, and then here he is again, saying to me gently and so lovingly, “Turn back to me and I will show you the way, come on, I am here”. He knows me because he knows human and cosmic suffering. Thank you for being there. Take care. Keep Up the Good

    • Grace Mary

      Excellent encounter with the Crucified. Thank you a million.

    • Caroline Connelly

      This passage really touched my heart. So many times in my life past, present and future, I have been turned away from by family, friends. Perhaps I was too intense at times, and rude to others, I must admit, maybe I deserved it. But I was given another opportunity to redeem myself and I walked thru that door of faith that God opened for me. And I did feel him near me. Yes, there have been times when I still suffer with the human shackles we put on ourselves. But God is there, patiently, helping us shed them so we can free ourselves to do his will.

    • ak

      All because of love....He suffers as we suffer. So there can be joy in pain , victory in our failures...because He is there... with us..Thankyou for this meditation. It makes me realize. that. for us Christians, there is only one Feast..Easter..the celebration of His pasch. , our pasch, from death to life. in our daily lives...No wonder He looked forward with joy. to that hour..His hour of Death and Resurrction! Makes our dark moments, bright with His presence at every moment, telling us..I love you, i love you,i love you..What else matters?

    • Matthew Owers

      Dr. Kreeft once again reminds us of the real characteristics at play...humanity, imperfect and deserving of death--and Christ, perfect yet freely accepting of a cruel and humiliating crucifixion--so the imperfect might live. Love conquers all; evil, betrayal, complicity, rejection, and pride. Christ loved us, and still loves us as perfectly as a mother loves an innocent child. This is a lesson worthy of remembering.

    • Anne Ryan

      This article has such ring of truth to it. It is most courageous in spirit and it does not flinch. It is in no way sentimental, or maudlin or surface-y as are too many religious writings. And so it convinces. Thank you so much.

    I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the one Nietzsche ridiculed as “God on the Cross.” In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples and stood respectfully before the statue of Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in Godforsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. – John Stott

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    Calvary is judo. The enemy’s own power is used to defeat him. Satan’s craftily orchestrated plot, rolled along according to plan by his agents Judas, Pilate, Herod, and Caiaphas, culminated in the death of God. And this very event, Satan’s conclusion, was God’s premise. Satan’s end was God’s means. God won Satan’s captives – us – back to himself by freely dying in our place.

    It is, of course, the most familiar, the most often-told story in the world. Yet it is also the strangest, and it has never lost its strangeness, its awe, and will not even in eternity, where angels tremble to gaze at things we yawn at. And however strange, it is the only key that fits the lock of our tortured lives and needs. We needed a surgeon, he came and reached into our wounds with bloody hands. He didn’t give us a placebo or a pill or good advice. He gave us himself.

    He came. He entered space and time and suffering. He came, like a lover. He did the most important thing and he gave the most important gift: himself. It is a lover’s gift. Out of our tears, our waiting, our darkness, our agonized aloneness, out of our weeping and wondering, out of our cry, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” he came, all the way, right into that cry.

    He sits beside us in the lowest places of our lives, like water. Are we broken? He is broken with us. Are we rejected? Do people despise us not for our evil but for our good, or attempted good? He was “despised and rejected of men.” Do we weep? Is grief our familiar spirit, our horrifyingly familiar ghost? Do we ever say, “Oh, no, not again! I can’t take it any more!”? Do people misunderstand us, turn away from us? They hid their faces from him as from an outcast, a leper. Is our love betrayed? Are our tenderest relationships broken? He too loved and was betrayed by the ones he loved. “He came unto his own and his own received him not.”

    Does it seem sometimes as if life has passed us by or cast us out, as if we are sinking into uselessness and oblivion? He sinks with us. He too is passed over by the world. His way of suffering love is rejected, his own followers often the most guilty of all; they have made his name a scandal, especially among his own chosen people. What Jew finds the road to him free from the broken weapons of bloody prejudice? We have made it nearly impossible for his own people to love him, to see him as he is, free from the smoke of battle and holocaust.

    How does he look upon us now? With continual sorrow, but never with scorn. We add to his wounds. There are two thousand nails in his cross. We, his beloved and longed for and passionately desired, are constantly cold and correct and distant to him. And still he keeps brooding over the world like a hen over an egg, like a mother who has had all of her beloved children turn against her. “Could a mother desert her young? Even so I could not desert you.” He sits beside us not only in our sufferings but even in our sins. He does not turn his face from us, however much we turn our face from him.

    Does he descend into all our hells? Yes. In the unforgettable line of Corrie ten Boom from the depths of a Nazi death camp, “No matter how deep our darkness, he is deeper still.” Does he descend into violence? Yes, by suffering it and leaving us the solution that to this day only a few brave souls have dared to try, the most notable in our memory not even a Christian but a Hindu. Does he descend into insanity? Yes, into that darkness too. Even into the insanity of suicide? Can he be there too? Yes, he can. “Even the darkness is not dark to him.” He finds or makes light even there, in the darkness of the mind – though perhaps not until the next world, until death’s release.

    Love is why he came. It’s all love. The buzzing flies around the cross, the stroke of the Roman hammer as the nails tear into his screamingly soft flesh, the infinitely harder stroke of his own people’s hammering hatred, hammering at his heart – why? For love. God is love, as the sun is fire and light, and he can no more stop loving than the sun can stop shining.

    Henceforth, when we feel the hammers of life beating on our heads or on our hearts, we can know – we must know – that he is here with us, taking our blows. Every tear we shed becomes his tear. He may not yet wipe them away, but he makes them his. Would we rather have our own dry eyes, or his tear-filled ones? He came. He is here. That is the salient fact. If he does not heal all our broken bones and loves and lives now, he comes into them and is broken, like bread, and we are nourished. And he shows us that we can henceforth use our very brokenness as nourishment for those we love. Since we are his body, we too are the bread that is broken for others. Our very failures help heal other lives; our very tears help wipe away tears; our being hated helps those we love. When those we love hang up on us, he keeps the lines open.

    God’s answer to the problem of suffering not only really happened two thousand years ago, but it is still happening in our own lives. The solution to our suffering is our suffering! All our suffering can become part of his work, the greatest work ever done, the work of salvation, of helping to win for those we love eternal joy.


    From Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter.

    Christ Carrying The Cross

    Jan van Hemessen, Christ Carrying The Cross (detail)
    View Full Painting

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