Preview: Newman on the Sufferings of Christ in His Passion

On Monday, April 11 (the Monday of Holy Week), I'll continue the Son Rise Morning Show series of reflections on Lenten sermons by Saint John Henry Newman edited and excerpted in The Tears of Christ. We'll be on the air at my usual time, about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern time. Please listen live on EWTN Radio or on your local EWTN affiliate.

The sermon I've chosen this week is "The Incarnate Son: a Sufferer and Sacrifice" which is divided into two meditations for Palm Sunday and the Monday of Holy Week in The Tears of Christ. According to the Chronology of his sermons, he delivered it on Good Friday,  April 1, 1836 and it is in the sixth volume of his Parochial and Plain Sermons, sermon number 6.

As I've often noted--based on many authorities--one of Newman's great efforts in his Parochial and Plain Sermons was to wake the Christian people of England up to the reality of their faith in God. They were living in a nominally Christian country with an Established Church as part of their governance, yet he saw signs that they did not really know what they believed. Their faith was notional, not real: it did not always affect their lives as English men and women. At the beginning of this sermon, he tells them:

Let us try, what is so very difficult, to put off other thoughts, to clear our minds of things transitory, temporal, and earthly, and to occupy them with the contemplation of the Eternal Priest and His one ever-enduring Sacrifice;—that Sacrifice which, though completed once for all on Calvary, yet ever abideth, and, in its power and its grace, is ever present among us, and is at all times gratefully and awfully to be commemorated, but now especially, when the time of year is come at which it was made. Let us look upon Him who was lifted up that He might draw us to Him; and, by being drawn one and all to Him, let us be drawn to each other, so that we may understand and feel that He has redeemed us one and all, and that, unless we love one another, we cannot really have love to Him who laid down His life for us.

So he's telling them not to think about the Passion of Our Lord like it's something they've heard about dozens of times, with their minds divided between it and what they're going to do after the service, what someone said to them yesterday, what they need to do to get ready for Easter Sunday, etc. Instead: Think about what Jesus has done for us and the effect it should have in our lives, so that we love Him and one another.

Newman hopes to awaken that love by reminding them of the Doctrine of the Incarnation, as they profess in the Nicene Creed!

It would be well if we opened our minds to what is meant by the doctrine of the Son of God dying on the Cross for us. I do not say we shall ever be able to solve the mystery of it, but we may understand in what the Mystery consists; and that is what many men are deficient in. They have no clear views what the truth of the matter is; if they had, it would make them more serious than they are. Let it be understood, then, that the Almighty Son of God, who had been in the bosom of the Father from everlasting, became man; became man as truly as He was always God. He was God from God, as the Creed says; that is, as being the Son of the Father, He had all those infinite perfections from the Father which the Father had. He was of one substance with the Father, and was God, because the Father was God. He was truly God, but He became as truly man. He became man, yet so as not to cease in any respect being what He was before. He added a new nature to Himself, yet so intimately, that it was as if He had actually left His former self, which He did not. "The Word became flesh:" even this would seem mystery and marvel enough, but even this was not all; not only was He "made man," but, as the Creed goes on to state, He "was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate, He suffered and was buried." . . .

Think of this, all ye light-hearted, and consider whether with this thought you can read the last chapters of the four Gospels without fear and trembling.

And then to bring images of what was done to Jesus on Good Friday to his congregation's mind's eye, Newman cites verses from the Gospels of John, Matthew, and Luke (John 18:22, Matthew 26:67, Luke 22:63-65, Luke 23:11, John 19:1-5, Luke 23:33), recounting how Jesus was struck, mocked, brutalized, scourged, nailed to a cross, exposed, and pierced.

Then he exhorted them to think about that suffering and Who suffered it:

Now I bid you consider that that Face, so ruthlessly smitten, was the Face of God Himself; the Brows bloody with the thorns, the sacred Body exposed to view and lacerated with the scourge, the Hands nailed to the Cross, and, afterwards, the Side pierced with the spear; it was the Blood, and the sacred Flesh, and the Hands, and the Temples, and the Side, and the Feet of God Himself, which the frenzied multitude then gazed upon. This is so fearful a thought, that when the mind first masters it, surely it will be difficult to think of any thing else; so that, while we think of it, we must pray God to temper it to us, and to give us strength to think of it rightly, lest it be too much for us.

But Newman must also remind us that Christ's sufferings, for which we should feel great compassion, also were the means of our salvation, because He endured these agonies in our human nature through His Incarnation and thus redeemed it and us:

We believe, then, that when Christ suffered on the cross, our nature suffered in Him. . . . The Son of God then took our nature on Him, that in Him it might do and suffer what in itself was impossible to it. What it could not effect of itself, it could effect in Him. He carried it about Him through a life of penance. He carried it forward to agony and death. In Him our sinful nature died and rose again. When it died in Him on the cross, that death was its new creation. In Him it satisfied its old and heavy debt; for the presence of His Divinity gave it transcendent merit. . . And thus, when it had been offered up upon the Cross, and was made perfect by suffering, it became the first-fruits of a new man. It became a Divine leaven of holiness for the new birth and spiritual life of as many as should receive it. And thus, as the Apostle says, "If one died for all, then did all die" (2 Cor. 5:14); "our old man is crucified in Him, that the body of sin might be destroyed" (Romans 6:6); and "he made us alive together with Christ . . . and raised us up with Him in the heavenly places with Christ Jesus." (Ephesians 2:5-6)

This is great meditation for Holy Week as we remember the Passion of Our Lord through the Holy Triduum. 

Blood of Christ, shed profusely in the Scourging, save us.
Blood of Christ, flowing forth in the Crowning with Thorns, save us.
Blood of Christ, poured out on the Cross, save us.

Best wishes for a holy and blessed Holy Week!