“God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life.” 

Before the world was, you were known. You were seen. You were desired. You were dreamed of. You were longed for.  

You were loved.  

You were destined for a joy, a hope, a glory which “no eye has seen” nor “the heart of man imagined” – a destiny which encompasses and yet surpasses every good which the human heart cries out even now in hopeful search for. 

There is a linen cloth, stored in a cathedral in an otherwise ordinary industrial town in Italy which bears a remarkable story, a story that is part of your story and part of my story, because it is part of our story – the story of humanity. 

“To accomplish this, when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son as Redeemer and Savior.” 

This linen cloth bears the image of man. 

A man with wounds.  

Our wounds. 

Our wounds of fear, of despair. Our wounds of sin. The wounds of a death you and I were not created for. A death which the man on this cloth, on this burial shroud, did not deserve. 

And yet, it was nevertheless a death which he bore. 

A death He bore for you and for me. A martyrdom of love borne for us in all our dysfunction and struggles, in all of our stresses and challenges, in all the mountains of life that so often seem too high to climb.  

He knew. And even still, He knows. 

The torn and crucified flesh which you and I see in the image of the man on the shroud is the flesh which has shared every suffering we have ever borne or will ever one day bear. 

The flesh we see is the flesh of a man that would come to bleed with anguished love in a garden, sharing an intimate dialogue with His Father, so longing “that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me” 

“For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek him, to know him, to love him with all his strength. He calls together all men, scattered and divided by sin, into the unity of his family, the Church.” 

In that darkened garden on the night of His passion, the Lord of Lords and Source of All Life, the Eternal Word of God and the Logos of Creation in the flesh passionately ached with love for you and for me, his beating heart echoing in intimate union with His Heavenly Father. And as his blood burst through his skin, I imagine this same heart began to burn with our own vision, sharing every moment of weakness, every fear, sorrow, pain, and despair, every alienation in our fallen pride that we have ever suffered or will come to suffer.  

“No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.” 

The Bridegroom, consumed in all his being with the very love of God, was joining humanity in the experience of our own fallen nature, sharing utterly in all of our pain and alienation, in all of our doubt and loneliness, in all of the isolation of our regrets and mistakes. 

And as the iron pierced his hands and feet on the hill he was to die on, the heart that knew love and only love – not merely love of this world but the eternal love of the Almighty Father – cried out in longing agape for the very faces which were delivering him this unimaginable pain. 

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” 

The same divine person whose flesh was torn open for love of you and I, allowing Himself to be betrayed, scourged, crowned, kicked, mocked, pierced with iron, and finally left to die while nailed to a tree, gasping for air, brutally executed by a totalitarian power at the behest of the very people he had come to save… 

This person would soon rise in a resurrected and glorified body, walking out the tomb where his lifeless corpse once lay, proclaiming “peace be with you” to the same friends who had abandoned him at his own darkest hour.  

In mere weeks He would stand before these friends, speaking of another mysterious person whose power which they would soon come to know, and in a moment was “lifted up,” entering a glory which these same men would in time enter themselves, forming in Himself the door to the eternal joy which the Creator of everything has so dreamed to share with His beloved children. 

Just days later, the same mysterious spirit that brought this redeemer into the world by the faith of a young Jewish girl would arrive anew, descending as rushing wind and blazing fire from heaven, forming not only a changed but a new humanity, one that would grow to include those on every continent, in every time and place beckoned by the divine redeemer to be the sign of the eternal communion that is the Triune God Himself. 

“In his Son and through him, he invites men to become, in the Holy Spirit, his adopted children and thus heirs of his blessed life.” 

God had not abandoned his people in their fear and cowardice, nor left them alone in their isolation and despair.  

God had come in Spirit, now pouring himself into the depths of His people’s very being, permeating their heart and mind, moving and transforming all that they were and all that they could become. 

In that moment, heaven stretched to earth in the wedding of time and eternity, in the union of things now and of things yet to come. 

The same divine person that bled and was betrayed… that same person now comes to us, offering Himself up completely in resplendent simplicity and utter humility under the appearance of bread and wine. 

The wind and fire of divinity that poured out of heaven into the people of God in Jerusalem… that same life is now poured into our own humanity at our baptism, at every absolution, and is deepened within our whole being at every Eucharistic communion. 

On that blessed feast in Jerusalem nearly 2000 years ago, crowds of pilgrims heard a fisherman who had once denied the very divine Lord that now dwelt and moved within him stand anew and boldly raise his voice, declaring without reserve “this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it.”  

The very walking, breathing, speaking Love of God, the one whom death could not hold, now lives and moves within his people and through them is being extended to the whole of humanity, to the very “ends of the earth” as that same incarnate Love had Himself promised long ago. 

This person, this man which the extraordinary linen cloth in that cathedral in Italy bears an unmistakable mirror of, the man whom the people of God know by faith is the eternally-spoken Word of the Creator of everything… this same man is calling out to you and me just as he did to that fisherman on the water long ago. 

“Take heart; it is I. Do not be afraid.”