When the Son is scourged naked and nailed naked to the cross, when the thorns and nails bite into his flesh, he has re-assumed the nakedness of the first man - not however, because of innocence, but rather because of sin, for his arms embrace all that is, was and will be. Everything, completely exposed, and in all its truth, is thrust upon the Naked One. For him, the one stripped of all power, the sum of that burden is no longer totally surveyable. It is not the result of an accumulation and summation during the years of his life; on the Cross the totality of the burden can no longer be subdivided in order to be dealt with in this fashion. What he has shouldered in a certain orderly manner now suddenly turns against him in all its weight like an alien external power, and it seems to him he does not have the slightest thing in common with all that he has taken upon himself. A neutral, anonymous power with no owner breaks upon him. Yet every spearhead of every sin is pointed towards him and wounds him. His confession is now like the cry"Everything!" Here and there something specific appears and acquires contours, and then his cry becomes "That too!"
When he cries out "Father, why have you forsaken me?" and "I am thirsty!" these cries are also an immense confession. The are an expression and answer to the enormous power of sin, which is the resonating response "For this reason" to his own question "Why?"....
For the Lord this encounter is particularly difficult, since it is the encounter of the totally pure with sin itself. When he as a man absolved someone from sin, as he did for example, with Mary Magdalene, he saw in the absolved person the results of his absolution. He suffered under the sin but rejoiced in the purification. Suffering and joy generated one another. Here, however, all subjective feeling is at an end, and there remains only a kind of objectivized experience of the terrible, a kind of suffocation and burial under the fatal burden of world guilt.
Confession, Adrienne von Speyr, pp. 51-52, 56
".....The Church does not function, after all, in the manner of a sieve, which would sift the good from the bad, would effect a strict selection; but more like a melting pot into which everything is thrown together and makes an effort to live from God's grace. The Church is vested with grace. She lives from the grace of the living Lord, but no less from the grace of the Father, who gives her his sanction, and the grace of the Spirit, who blows through her. She is the locus of an encounter with eternity, indeed, quite actually the locus of the beginning of life, the beginning of eternity in the midst of time. Man is drawn into this origin, shaken to the core in it and converted, enriched, and at the same time made poorer. Within it he gauges constantly anew what the Lord is, what distance separates him from sinners; he comes to feel his own powerlessness, sees also the consummate powerlessness of the Lord, which is the source of all grace, and understands that there can be no comparison between the two. And yet he knows that his existence in the Church is nothing but grace and love, and that even the feeling of his powerlessness is an instance of the Lord's grace, a gift in view of his poverty, and a sign by which the Father recognizes him."
The Countenance of the Father, Adrienne von Speyr, p.103 Ignatius Press
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