John Fischer The Catch

In dramatic fashion, Pope Francis delivered what turned out to be his final address yesterday — his traditional Easter message from the Vatican — and promptly went home to be with the Lord earlier this morning. Following is a paragraph from that address I thought was particularly poignant today, as we think of how Easter plays out into the rest of the year.

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The wounds on His hands bled slowly. Pressure from the weight of His body held back the flow. If there had been no other sounds that afternoon, it probably would have sounded like the slow, steady drip off the eaves of a mountain cabin on a damp, foggy night.

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On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross

The emblem of suffering and shame

And I love that old cross where the dearest and best

For a world of lost sinners was slain

                      – George Bernard (1913)

On a hill called Calvary, two thousand years ago, the Son of God was nailed to a cross for the real sins of the world. There was nothing pretty about the Crucifixion. When stripped of the religious sentiment of two thousand years of symbolism and ornamentation it appears as a gruesome and incomprehensible execution of God’s most treasured human expression of Himself.

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