Jesus Falls the First Time
(Those of us who have had the privilege and honor of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land always make Jerusalem part of the holy time. There, although the Jewish Temple has been replaced by a grand mosque, we can see the very places we read about in the New Testament, the actions of our redemption through the life, passion, death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. Many make the way of the cross, the Via Dolorosa, an ancient prayer service with stops at places that commemorate events of Our Lord’s tortuous journey to the place of His execution. Some of the stations, as they are called, are taken directly from the Gospels, some are inferred from the practice of crucifixion, and a few come from the more reliable Christian traditions.)
The third station of the cross envisions Jesus falling under the weight of the cross. Now when I was much younger, I noticed three falls in the fourteen stations, and figured that whoever put the devotion together had twelve things that actually could be documented in Scripture or tradition, but didn’t want two sets of six—the number of incompleteness. So he triplicated the first fall to give two sets of seven, the number of completeness and fulfillment. But there’s more to it than that, a lot more.
On a physical basis, we need to think carefully how this moment felt to Jesus, who was truly human and truly divine. Human flesh, our animal nature, has definite limits, and the Jewish leaders and Roman soldiers had already pushed the flesh of Jesus well beyond breaking. The inspired Scriptures tell us that our Lord had fasted since the night before, the Last Supper. He had been dragged in chains to the High Priest’s council chamber and thrown into a dungeon below it, a dry cistern. He had been struck during His trial before Caiaphas. He’d been dragged to the Roman court, and then forced over to Herod for that corrupt leader’s entertainment. Pilate had ordered Him to be whipped with leather straps that had lead weights on their ends. He had lost a great deal of blood and probably hadn’t been given any water for fifteen hours. And He moments before experienced at least fifty pounds of dead weight, mostly on one shoulder. Of course He fell.
On the emotional and spiritual level, the actual encounter with the weight of the cross surely created burdens that cannot be measured in pounds. Jesus was taking on his shoulder a social rejection that had to be just as troubling as the feel of the cross. He was the Messiah of Israel, destined from the dawn of creation to be the King of the Universe, but His people had not only turned their backs on Him, but had betrayed Him and sent Him to execution. As Isaiah had predicted centuries earlier, His look was “marred beyond that of man.” He was “spurned and avoided by men, a man of suffering, accustomed [already] to infirmity.” His union with the Father and with the divine will moved Him forward for a while, but His human nature collapsed, and He fell.
We who have committed ourselves to follow Christ, who daily pray to the Father as He did, “Thy will be done,” sometimes fall. Maybe we fall, fail frequently. We start off life in a fallen human nature, and even though we are sacramentally made one with Christ, we are burdened with tendencies to sin that St. Paul calls “the flesh.” How do we handle those moral failures, especially the failures to do good? We must first realize that even though Jesus was sinless, He fell under persecution. We need to envision ourselves near Him, because He is nearer to us than we are to ourselves, and He has felt the same weakness and pain and exhaustion. Then we must repent of any sin, ask for forgiveness, and rise with Our Lord to carry that cross another few yards. Our union with Him is not only in triumph. It’s also in pain and loss and tragedy.
