Station 14: Who is God?

Jesus is Placed in the Sepulcher

Even though his body is dead, his history is alive, taunting and perhaps prophetically speaking, haunting. As I stand and focus on the 14th Station of the Cross, I see three men gently placing our Lord into his resting place. One to his left, one in the middle, and the third to his right. And as I look upon the burial of Jesus, this is what comes to mind: Our history with Jesus; that is, the history of the human race with our creator, and our Lord – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Looking at the man on the left I see the beginning of our history with Adam and Eve; the beginning of the relationship between creature and creator.

Then God said: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and the cattle, and over all the wild animals and all the creatures crawl on the ground (Genesis 1:26, NAB).

In the beginning, Adam and Eve were placed in the Garden of Eden, given eternal life, and the opportunity to share their life with God and his Angels. But they chose something else, I’m not really sure what they chose, but whatever it was it did not include God unless God ceased to be God. It seems, to this writer, that they would have ‘accepted” Him had He granted them a “higher station” equal to or superior to the Holy Trinity, but nothing less than God. Adam and Eve were willing to have Him in their lives if He allowed them to recreate God in their image!

Impossible, God is God and there is no other. If we cannot understand the relationship between creature and creator, and admit our dependence on the Holy Trinity, even for our very next breath, then we can never know God, serve Him, nor ever see Him face to face, and we will not be able to spend eternity with Him. Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden; they became
mortal, and God left them to themselves.

The man on the left represents our first encounter with God, and it failed. But history continued—as it always will until the end of time—to our next major turning point in our contact with God, from Adam and Eve to Noah. Between the time of Adam and Eve and Noah, the Bible gives us very little history, Tradition even less. I hope that during that dark period at least some, hopefully, many souls found their way to heaven, even Adam and Eve hopefully repented and again found favor with God, but I don’t know, at least not yet. I just have to wait until later when I find myself in another place where hopefully I will be able to ask our Lord these questions face to face.

I wonder if the history between the time of Adam and the time of Noah is even important because whatever it was, was washed away, buried by cubits of water. At the second “turning point” man was not only evicted from the garden of Eden but also evicted from the face of the Earth – except for Noah and his family. Whatever that history was it does not look like a history of success; success in terms of us knowing and accepting God, of appreciating and respecting the relationship between Creator and creature, or that he is God and we are not, that we were created to love and live life in conjunction with his love and mercy, to live life in his grace, to be thankful for all that he has done, and then to get down on our knees and worship the one true God, the Holy Trinity as our way of saying “yes” we understand the relationship between Creator and creature. We understand and accept it, we are grateful for it, and in return give you respect, gratitude, and love; this is our worship and our recognition of what is true, that God is God.

However, this is not the way our history has unfolded, for God looked upon the Earth and

When the Lord saw how great was man’s wickedness…and how no desire that his heart conceived was ever anything but evil, he regretted that he made man on earth, and his heart was grieved. So, the Lord said: ‘I will wipe out from the earth the men whom I have created…for I am sorry that I made them…’ (Genesis 6: 5-7, NAB) .

This is how the second encounter between God and man ended, a disaster, a failure; again we had turned away from God because we didn’t want him to be our God, or we just didn’t want God to be God, perhaps once again man had wanted to recreate God in their image, or to create a God of
their choosing; but whatever the prevailing thought of the time it was clear that once again the
relationship between God and man had failed, and the second man assisting in the burial of
Christ in the Stations of the Cross represents this era of the building of the Ark, the disastrous
flood, and the hope of a better future.

History continues until it stops with the second coming of Christ represented by the third man. In the Apostles Creed we, Catholics, have been saying for over two thousand years the following words:

the third day He arose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead (A Catechism for adults, by Fr. William J. Cogan, 1990 Edition, p. 133).

When Jesus returns after extending to us all the mercy possible culminating in his death on the cross, how will we greet Him? Will we be prepared for His judgment? What will He find? Will He find us, the human race, created to love life, to love and worship our Lord, and to love each other, eager and ready to join Him and the communion of saints for all eternity?

History gives us hints but never tells the whole story. How we meet our Lord, and how we greet Him in this final encounter is up to us. We are not predestined, and Fate is not our master. With our free will, we can choose the light of Christ or the darkness of the demon. True, we are saved by grace, and Faith is our salvation but it is and always has been our choice. The choice for each person to decide how to respond to God’s gift of Faith. Do we keep it, cherish it, and allow God’s gift of grace (Faith) to lead us to heaven, or do we turn away, perhaps with a “thank you, Lord, I respect your gift, but not now”? Whatever we do; however, we respond, we are responsible for our actions. Ultimately, we either say yes or no to God. I’d like to close this meditation with a poem, entitled “Indifference” written by Geoffrey Studdert-Kennedy, as follows:

When Jesus came to Golgotha they hanged Him on a tree, They drave great nails through hands and feet, And made a Calvary. They crowned Him with a crown of thorns; Red were his wounds and deep, For those were crude and cruel days, and human flesh was cheap. When Jesus came to Birmingham, They simply passed Him by; They never hurt a hair of Him, They only let him die.
For men had grown more tender, And they would not give Him pain; They only passed down the street, And left Him in the rain. Still Jesus cried, ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ And still it rained the winter rain That drenched Him through and through. The crowds went home and left the streets Without a soul to see; and Jesus crouched against a wall And cried for for Calvary!