Ave Maria Meditations
At the very first step of the way to Calvary, Jesus stumbles and falls. He is down on His knees in the dirt! What has happened to this Man? This Man who just now declared Himself to be king of a spiritual world with legions of Angels at His command, who has been known to hold back the overwhelming force of the storm and still the raging seas by an act of His will, who by a mere touch of His hand caused a living fig tree to wither, and who has fallen now under the purely material weight of a Cross He so lately welcomed.
The crowd thronging outside the judgment hall are laughing derisively. Some of them remember hearing Him say that any man who wanted to follow Him could only do so carrying his cross. Now it seems that he can’t even take the first step on the way to be marked out by His footprints without falling. Is this the Man who claimed to be the Son of God? Why, He is not even a superman, he’s not even equal in stamina to one of those splendid young Roman soldiers who are prodding Him with their spears to get up! After all, He is just an ordinary man, like any other in that huge crowd milling around Him…
The Cross which Christ has fallen under is the cross that most ordinary human beings fall under, and that at the beginning of adult life; a material cross, the burden of the material struggle that nearly everyone must shoulder. There is the first fall, the first fall that each one of us knows, with the shock of it and the shame. Jesus takes the shock and the shame for us all…Yes, Christ prostrate there under the Cross, lives through the humiliation and bewilderment of those who seem to fail at the start: those taken suddenly by surprise, who came out full of self-confidence to wrestle with and overcome the world, to overcome its materialism, its political economic systems, its injustice, its hardships and its tears, confident that they could set their feet in Christ’s footsteps, shoulder His cross, and make the journey of life, find themselves tripped up at His first footprint.
The first fall is the real first self-knowledge. Now we know our weakness, we know our helplessness before the difficulties of life, our total inability to shoulder our responsibilities. We know that we cannot get up by ourselves, we cannot shoulder the burden for the second time by ourselves, we cannot face our own self contempt or the derision of others by ourselves. We realize now that we are wholly dependent on Christ, dependent on Him to act in us, to lift Himself up in us and lift us up in Him. His weakness is our strength… no longer do we seek to carry the burden with our own hands, but with His. No longer do we try to walk in His footsteps, we tread the way with His feet.
Caryll Houselander from The Way of the Cross
