"Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise."

Trust in God

Thus we stand before the crucifix, Jesus hanging on the cross, and ask, how did we get to this point and what does it mean? Well, according to the Bible, it begins in a garden, a garden called paradise, where God planted and raised up mankind as an act of love and trust. Here our relationship with God is natural and idyllic, and we are given the mission to grow and flourish as we embrace God's creation. All is in order and God's only requirement is that we trust in God and in what God gives to us. But for some mysterious reason we end up not trusting and we break that trust in a fundamental way. We usurp God's place and grasp at equality with God and fall into Sin. In fact our lack of trust is so grievous that this Sin entered our spiritual DNA and infects all people everywhere and at all times. This Sin is the grounding, originating, elemental disorder that lies behind all the moral and spiritual disorders of the human condition (Robert Barron). To reemphasize, this Sin is not just an act of disobedience toward God, a breaking of some rule; but it is a failure to trust in God. As we succumb to this failure, we find ourselves outside the garden of God with the gates of paradise shut.

And so even to this day our human life is bifurcated - divided into two paths - where I have my real life in which I do what I need to do in order to survive; and my trusting life where love and harmony guide my way. Our overarching question is that, now that we are in this state, how do we reconcile the split life we experience? Here we need now to turn to Salvation history out of which we hear God speaking to us. I myself will save you; I myself will overcome the Sin and I do this through you! Thus we see God entering into a covenant relationship with Adam, then Noah, finally with Abraham and Moses who form and grow a people dedicated to this covenant. This people, called Israel, are called to be faithful to the covenant as God is faithful so that through them God will reconcile and save all humankind and also all creation. Yet the people, however enthusiastic, struggled to keep the faith. We see that representatives of the people, Abraham, Moses, Samuel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel were transformed in faith and put their trust in God and his word and exhorted the people to do likewise. But the people in their life's journey could not in fact reconcile their struggle and be perfectly faithful to God and the covenant. So in the fullness of time God became the fulfillment of his promise. He came to us out of Israel as promised. He came to us in person in the form of one of us, Jesus, God's love for us in the concrete. Or as St. Paul quotes the very earliest Christians, "Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human appearance, he humbled himself becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross." Equality with God is that something we grasped at in the original garden and this is what defines the Sin. By fulfilling complete trust in God through his life and through the crucifixion, Jesus reconciled our human condition.

And so here we find ourselves still before the crucifix now asking how can I follow the lead of Jesus and convert my life to one of trust? More personally, I ask myself, looking at the crucifix, how can I not trust a love that is so obvious, so open, and so all embracing? But I do struggle to live that trust. I must somehow find in myself the willingness to embrace God's plan for my life and the lives of all. God's plan does include all humankind and God has formed from the seed planted by Jesus a body called the Church and God has breathed His own Spirit into it. Embracing this body and Spirit means renewing our trust in God which we celebrate in the season to come - the season we call Easter. Contemplating the crucifix leads us to this embrace because with our spiritual eyes we see that here God has opened the gates to Paradise. Now we need to follow through and grow in the garden of our lives trust in God in its completeness so as to be able to enter God's garden ourselves.