Every year I watch during one of the wee hours of our open adoration between the Mass of the Lord's Supper and morning prayer on Good Friday. Every time it is one of my favorite hours of the entire year. Here are the first of my notes from this hour:
I feel very distant from my bride.
My Bridegroom would seem to have me know that, while her distance is not His desire, it is yet His gift to me. It is but the smallest taste of the separation He feels for His beloved, the bitter truth that marked His agony. The burden of our sin could not help but be accompanied with the sadness of knowing that so many whose sins He carried with Him to Calvary would yet reject Him, even resent Him, though He did nothing that was not the Father's will. Yet rather than react to the hurt of our rejection by rejecting us in return, our deareast Jesus responds by embracing us in love - indeed, in the greatest love there can be, laying down His life for us - even though it causes Him so much more pain before it can bring forth the joy of our deliverance into Him.
Still today He tastes the unspeakably bitter gall of our separation from Him. "If we are the Body," then we are part tongue, and we must taste it, too, and yet respond as does our Head: always with the sweet embrace of self-sacrificing love.
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