Quote/s of the Day – 23 March – Tuesday of Passion Week or the Fifth Week of Lent, Readings: Numbers 21:4-9, Psalms 102:2-3, 16-18, 19-21, John 8:21-30
“Are you able to drink the cup
that I am to drink?”
Matthew 20:22
“…And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”
John 3:14-15
“The servant is not greater than his Master”
John 13:16
“He conquered death,
broke the gates of hell,
won for Himself a people
to be His co-heirs,
lifted flesh from corruption
up to the glory of eternity.”
“The Son of God is nailed to the Cross
but on the Cross,
God conquers human death.
Christ, the Son of God, dies
but all flesh is made alive in Christ.
The Son of God is in hell
but man is carried back to heaven.”
St Hilary of Poitiers (315-368)
Father & Doctor of the Church
The Word of the Cross
by Saint Paulinus of Nola (c 354-431)
Look on thy God, Christ hidden in our flesh.
A bitter word, the cross and bitter sight:
Hard rind without, to hold the heart of heaven.
Yet sweet it is, for God upon that tree
Did offer up His life upon that rood
My Life hung, that my life might stand in God.
Christ, what am I to give Thee for my life?
Unless take from Thy hands the cup they hold,
To cleanse me with the precious draught of death.
What shall I do? My body to be burned?
Make myself vile? The debt’s not paid out yet.
Whate’er I do, it is but I and Thou,
And still do I come short, still must Thou pay
My debts, O Christ, for debts Thyself hadst none.
What love may balance Thine? My Lord was found
In fashion like a slave, that so His slave
Might find himself in fashion like his Lord.
Think you the bargain’s hard, to have exchanged
The transient for the eternal, to have sold
Earth to buy Heaven? More dearly God bought me.
“How can you become a sharer,
in His glory (1 Pt 5:1)
if you will not consent,
to become a sharer,
in His humiliating death?”
St Simeon the New Theologian (949-1022)
“Let us then learn from the Cross of Jesus our proper way of living.
Should I say ‘living’ or, instead, ‘dying’?
Rather, both living and dying.
Dying to the world, living for God.
Dying to vices and living by the virtues.
Dying to the flesh, but living in the spirit.
Thus in the Cross of Christ, there is death
and in the Cross of Christ there is life.
The death of death is there and the life of life.
The death of sins is there and the life of the virtues.
The death of the flesh is there and the life of the spirit.”
St Aelred of Rievaulx (1110-1167)
“ … If you die with Him,
you shall also likewise
live with Him.
If you are His companion in punishment,
so shall you be in glory.”
Thomas à Kempis (1380-1471)
(Book II, Ch 12)