The Passion

Mar 28

Jesus Christ: Yesterday, Today, and Forever.

This Sunday we “celebrate” Passion Sunday; memorializing the death (by torture) that Jesus suffered for love of us. Jesus models what a true hero is: someone who sacrifices his life for love of the other, even when the one he is saving is the one who is taking his life. Put another way: it’s one thing to willingly die to save those who love you, it’s another to die to save those who hate you. Add to that; the one who is doing the dying and saving isn’t a peer, but your creator. What love.

Words escape us when we ponder the passion and death of Jesus Christ, but then sometimes silence and meditation speak louder than words. Along those lines, I did a little research into the theology of the Passion and found that Christians didn’t start dealing with it until the Middle Ages; it was simply too much to bear. It seems that Good Friday liturgies, Stations of the Cross, or even crucifixes didn’t enter into mainstream Catholicism until the early 1200’s. We can thank Saints Bernard of Clairvaux and Francis for that. Even the phenomena of the stigmata didn’t start showing up until St. Francis experienced it in the 1200’s; more than300 confirmed cases have been documented since. I leave you here with an article I wrote on the Shroud of Turin from 2019. Between it and the Gospels, we have a brutally detailed picture of the love that died for us on Calvary. It is something to ponder, and someone to love.

The Shroud of Turin
Pastor’s Column from April 14, 2019

Jesus of Nazareth is Lord and God!

The Bible doesn’t tell us what Jesus looked like, how do we know? Answer: The Shroud of Turin.

Today is Passion or Palm Sunday, where at Mass we solemnly read through Our Lord’s passion and death, yet the scriptures aren’t the only place that testify to what happened to Our Lord Jesus Christ at His death. There is one relic par-excellent that irrefutably testifies to the truth of the scriptures, that relic is the Shroud of Turin.

As part of 1st Century Jewish burial custom, people were wrapped in a burial cloth. “They took the body of Jesus and bound it with burial cloths along with the spices, according to Jewish burial custom.” Jn 19:40 Later on: “They both ran, but the other disciple [John] ran faster than Peter and arrived at the tomb first; he bent down and saw the burial cloths there, but did not go in.” Jn 20:4 Because of what they discovered on the burial cloth, it was preserved by his disciples after the Resurrection, and became a closely guarded relic.

I don’t have the space in two pages to lay out the historical journey the Shroud (burial cloth of Christ) took to end up in Turin, Italy in 1578, where it has stayed ever since. Instead, I want to share what the Shroud reveals about the man on it, Jesus Christ, and what facts it establishes about Him and what that means for our faith and the faith of others. But first, the one objection the media uses to discredit the validity of the Shroud.

In 1987 a team of scientists were allowed to closely examine the Shroud, what they found matched everything that one would expect if the Shroud were the burial cloth of Christ, but for one thing: the carbon-14 test to determine the age of the cloth. That test showed that the area of the cloth that was tested came from the Middle Ages. Those tests are now believed to have been taken from an area of the cloth that was patched on in the Middle Ages, and patched with a difficult to detect interweaving. A more recent 2013 testing suggests a date for the Shroud between 200 BC and AD 200 – definitely not the Middle Ages, and 200 years on either side of Christ’s death. Go here for news of the 2013 test results:

When considering the evidence, we have many items which fit with the known facts and fit with each other, but one piece of evidence that does not fit, it is common sense to challenge that one piece of evidence and reject it, or try again to see why it doesn’t fit. This is what the 2013 research has done, and proven that the 1987 carbon-14 test was faulty. Lastly, there are many aspects of the image, cloth, and pollen/dirt found on the Shroud that could not have been done in the Middle Ages, if for no other reason than the technology doesn’t exist to forge it today, let alone many centuries ago. Let’s review what the Shroud reveals.

A. The Image of the Man on the Cloth

The Shroud has on it a faint, front and back full-body image of a 5’10” crucified man.
The image is not a stain. It is not painted. It is not burned on in a conventional manner. Instead it is an image seared onto the cloth with some technology that has yet to be explained.
The image of the man on the shroud can be read by 3-D imaging technology.
The image is a photographic negative. That means when a traditional photograph is taken, what should be the negative appears as a positive image.
Not only is it an accurate image of a dead man but the image is distorted as it should be if it was lying over a real body and the body vanished from within it.
The image affects only the cloth’s top two microfibers. It is so thin it can be scraped off with a razor blade. We don’t have the technology today to do that let alone 2,000 years ago. Furthermore, the image is uniform in intensity throughout the entire cloth with no variation in density or color.
The blood stains never turned black, as blood stains do when they age. Rather, the stains retain their original red color.
Unlike the image, the blood stains on the Shroud do fully penetrate the cloth front to back. The blood stains appeared on the cloth first followed by the image of the man. There is no image under the blood. This makes sense if the Shroud was made by God and not a human artist, because the blood from Good Friday precedes the Easter Sunday Resurrection.

B. Wounds & Gospel

The “man in the Shroud” is characterized by long hair, full beard, and a pattern of bloodstains that are compatible with the torturous wounds inflicted upon Jesus as recorded in all four New Testament Bible Gospel accounts.
Over 100 whip marks on every portion of his body, left by scourging from Roman flagra (multi-headed whips) and consistent with ancient Roman whips used at the time.
Blood stains that formed a circle around the top of his head are consistent with the crown of thorns.
Severely bruised knees that could have resulted from several falls [the Gospels state that Jesus fell three times].
Blood stains around holes in the wrists and feet that would be consistent with the aftermath of large spikes; the marks of crucifixion.
Blood stains around a large wound that would be consistent with an injury sustained by a spear in his side.
Scientific testing shows that the blood stains were formed due to contact with actual bleeding wounds.

C. Jewish Burial Customs

The shroud shows details perfectly consistent with first century Jewish burial customs.

D. Geographical Accuracy

The cloth is consistent with fabrics from first century Israel.
Pollen from the shroud is not only from the Jerusalem area, but from Turkey and the other places the Shroud is supposed to have resided on its way to Turin. Dust on the Shroud from the area around the knees and feet are from the area of Jerusalem.
There are even microscopic traces of a flower that grows only within 15 miles of Jerusalem, blossoms in the spring when Jesus was crucified, and were known to be used for burial.

In the Middle Ages of the first millennium, there was a tradition in the Roman liturgy that the cloth on the altar had to be linen, and the altar had to be made of rock, understood as a tomb. From this we can understand why the altar cloth (the cloth that lies on the altar to this day) is analogous to the Shroud, and until 1969, had to be of “pure linen.” The altar was understood as a sepulcher (tomb), where the lifeless elements became something alive – flesh and bone. What lays on Holy Redeemer’s altar right now, indeed every altar in the world today, is a direct consequence of the burial cloth of Christ given by God to the Church 2000 years ago.

In the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ,