Brennan Manning was an author who later was ordained as a Franciscan priest and who served in the Korean War. He tells the story of how he and his best friend, Ray, enlisted together and served in the same Marine platoon. One night a grenade landed in the foxhole where Brennan and Ray were. Ray threw his body over the grenade and died to save his friend.
Years later, Brennan visited Ray’s mother in Brooklyn. In the course of their conversation, Brennan asked her, “Do you think Ray loved me?”
Mrs. Brennan stood up, shook her finger in Brennan’s face and shouted, “What more could he have done for you?”
Brennan said that at that moment he pictured himself standing before the cross of Jesus wondering, “Does God really love me?” And Jesus’ mother Mary pointing to her son, saying, “What more could he have done for you?”1
And that’s the question I want to ask you this morning: what more could Jesus have done for you?
Our response has to do with who we are becoming in Christ, which can grow today, at this Mass. Holy Week is not the simple memorial of a past events that took place over 2000 years ago. In the liturgy, it is always the re-presentation of Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection. We are partakers in an event that takes place here and now.
Specifically, for today, on Passion Sunday, the liturgy re-presents the culmination and apex of all human suffering that was done for you when Jesus uttered the words of Psalm 22:1: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”
This voice is also a doctrine and not a complaint.
Although he experienced a real abandonment in what is known as the “cry of dereliction,” Christ could never be forsaken in his divine nature as the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity. So, his cry is for us, who are liable to fear and inferiority, says Saint Leo the Great. A later commentator says the same: The Head is pleading the cause of the body, and the anxious Physician so sympathizes with His sick ones that He disdains not to be in part infirm as they are.
Why is it important to affirm the truth that Christ is God who suffered for us, was divine?
Because as a member of the Trinity, it makes his death salvific!
Because Jesus is both God and man, his death on the cross is a sufficient sacrifice for the sins of humanity, bridging the gap between God and humanity.
So, now we bring to the Cross the various challenging aspects of our lives and vocations for help and healing:
For those who experience interpersonal abandonment, either earlier or later in life. Healing comes from receiving the empathy of the abandoned God, who cries our human cry, and has triumphed over all the forces of abandonment.2 Psalm 22:1 is the Scripture being fulfilled for you. Receive that and enter into community. Christ forsook the community’s help, who also abandoned him, so that community is now your healing.
In marriage, husbands, and wives fulfill your vows in your interpersonal communication. Abandonment prevails in small and large ways. The healing is to deliver the intimacy in your marriage out of what Jesus did for you.3
Thirdly, our many addictions are testimony to our social dereliction. Chemical, work, and sexual addiction only muffle the human cry of dereliction. They do not silence it. And addictions alienate us from ourselves.4
The answer lies in large part on what Pope Francis’s emphasizes; that people should avoid overstimulation, because “overstimulation makes it difficult to find ourselves integrated and happy” (LS §147). We need a different goal: doing fewer things, so that our presence with what we do may be blessed by God’s presence. Silence the competing pressures for attention, perfectly symbolized by the push notifications on electronic devices.
In sum, today we bring our lives to Jesus Christ in his divine empathy which is the Good News of his salvation so that today we may fully become who we are in Christ, Jesus.
1. James Bryan Smith, The Good and Beautiful God: Falling in Love with the God Jesus Knows, p. 142-143
2. John P. Reed, The Human Cry of Dereliction, Review and Expositor, 89 (1992) pg. 332
3. John P. Reed, pg. 337
4. John P. Reed, pg. 339
5-7. Source: Peter Fritz, God's Delight as Comfort and Challenge: Pope Francis on the Heart of Jesus, Church Life Journal is published by the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame, March 11, 2025
