Thursday In Passion Week.

Text from The Liturgical Year.

   By: Abbot Guéranger, O.S.B.

      Volume 6,

      Passiontide & Holy Week.

The Station at Rome is in the Church of Saint Apollinaris, who was a Disciple of Saint Peter and, afterwards, Bishop of Ravenna and a Martyr.

In today’s Epistle (Daniel the Prophet, Chapter 3), we hear that Juda, when captive in Babylon, did pour forth her Prayers to God, by the mouth of Azarias. Sion was desolate beyond measure; her people were in exile; her Solemnities were hushed. Her children were to continue in a strange land for seventy years; after which, God would be mindful of them, and lead them, by the hand of Cyrus, back to Jerusalem, when the building of the second Temple would begin; that Temple that was to receive the Messias within its walls.

What crime had Juda committed, that she should be thus severely punished ? The daughter of Sion had fallen into idolatry; she had broken the sacred engagements which made her the bride of her God.

Her crime, however, was expiated by these seventy years of captivity; and when she returned to the land of her fathers, she never relapsed into the worship of false gods.

When the Son of God came to dwell in her, He found her innocent of idolatry. But, scarcely had forty years elapsed after the Ascension of this Divine Redeemer, than Juda was again an exile; not, indeed, led captive into Babylon, but dispersed in every nation under the Sun, after having first seen the massacre of thousands of her children.

This time, it is not merely for seventy years, but for eighteen Centuries, that she is without Prince, or Leader, or Prophet, or Holocaust, or Sacrifice, or Temple. Her new crime must be greater than idolatry; for, after all these long ages of suffering and humiliation, the justice of The Father is not appeased !

It is, because the Blood that was shed by the Jewish people on Calvary was not the blood of a man — it was the Blood of a God.

The very sight of the chastisement inflicted on the murderers proclaims to the World that they were deicides. Their crime was an unparalleled one; its punishment is to be so, too; it is to last till the end of time, when God, for the sake of Abraham, His beloved, and Isaac, His servant, and Jacob, His holy one, will visit Juda with an extraordinary Grace, and her conversion will console the Church, whose affliction is then to be great by reason of the apostasy of many of her children.

This spectacle of a whole people bearing on itself the curse of God for having crucified The Son of God, should make a Christian tremble for himself.

It teaches him that Divine Justice is terrible, and that The Father demands an account of The Blood of His Son, even to the last drop, from those that shed it.

Let us lose no time, but go at once, and, in this precious Blood, cleanse ourselves from the share we have had in the sin of the Jews; and, throwing off the chains of iniquity, let us imitate those among them whom we see, from time to time, separating themselves from their people and returning to the Messias.

Let us, also, be converts, and turn to that Jesus, Whose Hands are stretched out on The Cross, ever ready to receive the humble penitent.