Venerable Fulton Sheen
You can find the rest of this rather beautiful meditation on the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass by Venerable Fulton Sheen here....
'...The figures at the Cross were symbols of all who crucify. We were there in our representatives. What we are doing now to the Mystical Christ, they were doing
in our names to the historical Christ. If we are envious of the good, we were there
in the Scribes and Pharisees.If we are fearful of losing some temporal advantage
by embracing Divine Truth and Love, we were there in Pilate. If we trust in
material forces and seek to conquer through the world instead of through the
spirit, we were there in Herod.
And so the story goes on for the typical sins of the world. They all blind us to
the fact that He is God. There was therefore a kind of inevitability about the
Crucifixion. Men who were free to sin were also free to crucify.
As long as there is sin in the world the Crucifixion is a reality.
As the poet has put it: "I saw the son of man go by, Crowned with a crown of
thorns.
'Was it not finished Lord,' said I, 'And all the anguish borne?' "He turned on me
His awful eyes; 'Hast Thou not understood? So every soul is a Calvary And every
sin a rood.'" We were there then during that Crucifixion.
The drama was already completed as far as the vision of Christ was concerned,
but it had not yet been unfolded to all men and all places and all times.
If a motion picture reel, for example, were conscious of itself, it would know
the drama from beginning to end, but the spectators in the theater would not
know it until they had seen it unrolled upon the screen.
In like manner, our Lord on the Cross saw His eternal mind, the whole
drama of history, the story of each individual soul, and how later on it
would react to His Crucifixion; but though He saw all, we could not know
how we would react to the Cross until we were unrolled upon the screen
of time. We were not conscious of being present there on Calvary that day,
but He was conscious of our presence.
Today we know the role we played in the theater of Calvary, by the way we live
and act now in the theater of the twentieth century. That is why Calvary is actual;
why the Cross is the Crisis; why in a certain sense the scars are still open; why
We shall find Calvary renewed, re-enacted, re- presented, as we have seen,
in the Mass. Calvary is one with the Mass, and the Mass is one with
Calvary, for in both there is the same Priest and Victim.
The Seven Last Words are like the seven parts of the Mass. And just as
there are seven notes in music admitting an infinite variety of harmonies
and combinations, so too on the Cross there are seven divine notes, which
the dying Christ rang down the centuries, all of which combine to form
the beautiful harmony of the world’s redemption....'