Meditation for Lent – The Cross

By Bridget Taumoepeau

One year I took my then four year old granddaughter to church and we happened to sit beside the twelfth Station of the Cross. When I explained about the Crucifixion and the events that had led up to it, she looked very solemn and, understandably, said that she thought “His mummy must have been very sad.” What came next, however, was much more profound. After a few moments of thoughtful silence, she turned to me with a puzzled look and said, “Why did he go with the soldiers?” The clarity of a child’s thoughts about why Jesus would willingly go with men, whom he knew would put him to death, was startling. It was as if she knew all about imaginative prayer and had placed herself in the scene with Jesus.

The logic of the incarnation and the cross is God’s logic, the logic of love

Ever since then I have often thought of her inquiry about the willing suffering of Christ, and now it is the season of Lent and time for meditation on these events. Not only did Jesus go willingly, for our sake, but did so despite his human terror of the terrible death he knew he would experience. Pope Francis tells us that, “The logic of the incarnation and the cross is God’s logic, the logic of love.” Such extraordinary love is hard to understand, harder to explain, but fills us with gratitude.

So, especially at this time, I thank God for sending his son Jesus and his sacrifice for our sake, for the wisdom of the Pope’s teaching and for a little child’s question. Deo gratias!