The Seven last Words from the Cross

"Jesus said to his mother: "Woman, this is your son".   Then he said to the disciple: "This is your mother."

From the Cross Jesus delivered, made His Last Testament, He bequethed all His wealth, all He possessed on earth;

He left all His Blood to His Beloved Bride … the Church.                                                   He gave all His earthly clothes to His enemies.                                                                     He issued an ‘Entry Permit’ to Heaven to the repentant thief.                                       He will be leaving His dead Body to Joseph of Arimathea … for a short period.  His soul to His eternal Father.

But He still has to dispose of, two precious treasures … His Dear Mother, Mary and the Beloved Apostle, John.

…and who is more worthy of such great Treasures if not His own Mother and His beloved Apostle, so He left them to each other; He gave His Mother to a son, and He gave the son to a Mother.

This was Mary’s second Annunciation; the first at Nazareth, the second on Golgotha. Mary gave the second birth. The first birth was called Jesus, the second ‘humanity’.

The first birth was painless, BUT the second birth was delivered through great suffering and pain.

Now we can understand why Jesus was called Mary FIRST child … because she had to give birth to me, to you and the rest of humanity.

“Thank you, Lord Jesus, for giving me your dear Mother as my Mother too.”

"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

“John Calvin, father of Jansenistic and Puritanical gloom, preacher of a fatal predestination to evil and and to eternal condemnation, dared to propose that Christ in His abandonment felt the definitive despair of the reprobate and suffered the identical torments of hell. His heresy admitted conflict between the justice and the mercy of God, between God’s anger and His love.

Calvin’s doctrine held that God threatened Christ with all the terrors of His justice; that He looked upon Him as an enemy and the target of His vengeance, delivering Him to the fury of His wrath and inflicting upon Him the punishment of the damned.

Calvin imagines that Christ redeemed us more by the physical atrocity than by His love and obedience to His Father, traits, which communicate to His suffering an infinite value.

The death of Christ, considered in itself, independent of His voluntary love and obedience, would have had NO effect  upon our well-being, and far from becoming an instrument of pardon, it would have been the basest of humanity’s crimes and one requiring a new Redemption.”

“Thank you, dear Lord for teaching us that Love and Obedience are the keys to our Salvation.”

Quotations from ‘He reigns from the Cross’ by Francisco Jose Gonzalez, S.J.