Monsignor Benson highlights the first rest the Incarnate Son of God had experienced, especially since He began the public ministry:
Our Lord has just cried aloud that Sixth Word in which He proclaimed that there was finished at last that "Father's business" of which He had first spoken in the Temple. Now He droops His Head again little by little upon His Breast, and in the words that he had learned at Mary's knee -- words in which every Jewish child committed the care of his soul into God's care through the coming night -- He commits His spirit into His Father's hands. For the evening is drawing on and the Sabbath is near in which once more, God, having seen all that He has done, pronounces it "Very good" and rests from His labours.
I. The thought of this Peace of Death into which our Divine Friend is passing is one of the most moving considerations of the Passion. He has been about His work for thirty-three years; and not for one instant, since He first drew mortal breath in the frosty stable of Bethlehem, has He ever yet truly rested. Even while He slept His Heart waked.
How many times do we read in the Gospels how Jesus responded to the needs of His people, even when trying to get some rest, some time to go away from the crowds with the disciples, or have some time for prayer?!
How utterly then has He earned His Rest! And at last He is to find it. The Soul through which such strong agonies have passed, is to sink into that peaceful place of refreshment and light where the souls that have served God according to their graces are awaiting that First Advent of their Redeemer. The Body that has borne so great a burden and heat of the day, that has been wearied with labours, and bowed down by sorrows -- and, at last, has been beaten, pierced and broken by the hands of those for whom such labours were borne -- this Body of His is to be laid in the cool rock-tomb, with wrappings of soft linen, soaked in spices and myrrh, to await once more the inbreathing of the Divine Energy which again shall pass through every vein, sinew and muscle, transforming each utterly back again to the unmarred Divine Image, in which, once again, now no longer subject to any law of limitation or weariness and waste, the Soul that can never sorrow again, shall eternally rejoice. Our Friend sleeps at last.
Monsignor Benson applies this sleep of peace to our mortality:
It is this for which we look at death -- the one hope that reassures and reconciles us to that violent cessation of activities which is to an energetic and vital soul the chief imaginative horror of death. It is even sometimes (so great is its attraction) -- we might almost say that it must be -- for every soul that is really taking part in the conflict of life, the chief attraction of death. For life must become from time to time an all but intolerable strain -- not only is there that weariness of body which arises from its incapacity to rise always to the demands of the soul; but there is that further weariness of soul arising from its effort to respond always as it ought, to the excitations and demands of grace. . . .
In the midst of our struggles, Benson urges us to find peace, "the Peace of God that passes all understanding" (Philippians 4:7) in the only place it can be found:
And it must come from one thing and one thing only, namely, a perfect balance in the environment for which our souls were made -- not as of a bird sleeping on the water, but of a bird poised in the air -- a perfect response, that is to say, on the part of our loving and lovable nature to the one adorable Nature which alone can support and can understand us -- in a word, that Peace can alone be found in that of which we have been treating throughout, in an intimate, intelligent, affectionate and voluntary Friendship with Christ, who made us for Himself, and designed His own Incarnation that the union might be complete.
That's why in the midst of our solemn celebrations of Holy Week, as we participate in those liturgies, we can't be morbid or bleak.
Death is no longer frightful; and Life is no longer burdensome.
Image Credit (Public Domain): Michelangelo's Pieta: The venerated image with its original canonical crown from 14 August 1637 by the Pontifical decree of Pope Urban VIII. Photo circa, 24 May 1888.
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