The Passion of the Lord gives witness to the depths of the suffering Our Lord Jesus Christ accepted in order to accomplish our salvation: "He humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross." (Phil 2: 8) We do not, in Matthew's account, hear the last words of Jesus as he expires, rather: "Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last." (Mtt 27: 50) Elijah does not come to save him. The impact of the death of the Son of God is manifested in the natural world with an earthquake while the curtain of the Temple is torn and the bodies of the saints are raised. The cosmic significance of the death of Jesus is thus illustrated. All that there is left to do is to bury the body. How often do we feel in our own lives that in the face of personal suffering and disaster all that there that remains to us is to bury out hopes, aspirations and dreams? Let us not forget that the words of St Paul to the Philippians do not stop at verse 8 instead they continue: "Therefore God highly exalted him and gave him a name above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." (Phil 2: 9-11) We need to identify ourselves with our Lord and unite our sufferings to him, trusting in God's power: "If we have died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him; if we deny him, he will also deny us; if we are faithless, he remains faithful - for he cannot deny his own self." (2 Tim 2: 11-13)
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