The Feast of the Lord’s Passion, which we have longed for and which the whole world may well desire, has come, and it does not allow us to keep silence in the tumult of our spiritual joys.
Though it is difficult to speak often on the same subject worthily and appropriately, the priest is not free to withhold from the people instruction by sermon on this great mystery of God’s mercy. The subject itself, being unspeakable, gives him ease of utterance, and what is said cannot altogether fail where what is said can never be enough. Let human frailty, then, yield to God’s glory, and always acknowledge itself unequal to the unfolding of His works of mercy. Let us labour in thought, fail in insight and falter in speech: it is good that even our right thoughts about the Lord’s majesty should be insufficient. For, remembering what the prophet says, “Seek the Lord and be strengthened; seek His face always”, no one must suppose that he has found all he seeks, lest he fail to draw near if he ceases in his efforts. And among all the works of God which exhaust man’s wondering contemplation, what so delights and yet so confounds our gaze as the Saviour’s Passion? Ponder as we may upon His omnipotence, which is of one and equal substance with the Father, the humility in God is more astonishing than His power, and it is harder to grasp the complete self emptying of the divine majesty than the exaltation of the servant’s form in Him. Yet we are greatly helped in understanding this by remembering that, although the Creator and the creature, the inviolable God and passible flesh, are utterly different, the properties of both natures meet in the one Person of Christ, so that in His acts both of weakness and of power, the humiliation belongs to the same Person as the glory.
