The Feast of Christ the King

Thoughts for the Week - Fr. R. Taouk 
28th October 2018

 Our Lord Jesus Christ - The Man of Sorrows
by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre

If the reality of two wills in Our Lord as presented in passages of the Gospels poses a difficulty to our minds, there is a reality more mysterious still: the fact that Our Lord could suffer in His will and in His human soul, even though consubstantially united to God. The Passion of the Saviour is a great mystery.

All the spiritual writers and all the theologians concur in saying that no one could suffer as much as Our Lord Jesus Christ suffered; yet the great mystery is that He could suffer while at the same time being rendered happy by the possession of the beatific vision in His human soul. It could happen that the soul of Christ, in His inferior reason, refused what, in the superior reason, He desired. St. Thomas makes a distinction between the inferior reason which governs the senses and the body, and the superior reason which reaches God and lives with God and in God. There was not in Him, however, any annoyance of appetites or rebellion of the flesh against the spirit. This rebellion occurs in us because the inferior appetite outstrips the judgment or transgresses the rule of reason; but in Christ, the inferior appetite was governed by the judgment of reason, for He allowed each of His lower faculties to follow its own movement only in the measure that He willed. In light of these considerations, it is clear that the superior reason of Christ fully experienced the pleasure and the enjoyment of its object: the beatific vision. For this reason nothing could happen to Him which would be a cause of sadness. The enjoyment of the beatific vision did not diminish Christ's Passion, nor did the Passion prevent this enjoyment, since there was no influence felt of one faculty upon the other, and each faculty was restricted to its proper object.

It is in His inferior faculty, then, that Our Lord suffered, and this explains the words which He spoke: "Let this chalice pass me by". St. Thomas explains that "Christ expresses the movement of the inferior appetite and the natural desire by which everyone naturally flees death and craves life". It was the natural desire that Our Lord had in Him, as we all have, to not die, to not suffer, to not have our life taken away. This was the experience of the inferior appetite. If He allowed it full expression, it was deliberately, in order to show that He was perfectly a man, and in order to show us and give us an example of the dominion which the superior appetite (the rational will) must have over the natural and sensible appetite: By saying, "Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt", he expresses the movement of the superior reason which considers everything from the angle and under the ordering of divine Wisdom. The superior appetite consents to the Passion because it is moved by divine Wisdom. Let us learn in the school of the Saviour to stand fast when undergoing trials whether physical or spiritual, by keeping the summit of our soul unshakably attached to God by faith, hope, and charity.