Through His Suffering

The First Fridays of the month help us keep in mind in a special way what we ordinarily commemorate on every Friday:  the passion and death of Jesus.  As we move further into Lent, we begin to focus more on this aspect of the season, not neglecting, however, our efforts of discipline, prayer, fasting and alms giving.  The mission of Jesus was the great Atonement, the reconciliation of the human race with its Creator, a relationship that had been broken by the first sin: the disobedience of the first parents in their prideful hope to become like God.  We have inherited that same instinct, and make decisions based on that same premise time and time again.  It took a supremely loving act of self-surrender to "win us back" to the Father, and give us the model and grace of how to keep our relationship with God in its proper order.  It is Jesus, who through his suffering, death and resurrection (the Paschal Mystery),  has won our salvation, so it is not by our efforts that we are saved.  If it were totally up to us and our power alone, we'd find ourselves sitting outside the locked gate of Eden.  Our strength, our courage, our consolation is that no, it is not us, but Jesus who is our messiah and "by his bruises we are healed." (Is. 53:3).
Bro. Rene