The Fire of Christ’s Love
it goes on: “Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.” Every time I hear this hymn, I am compelled to think, “Alas, yes, I was also there, I was also there, when they crucified my Lord!” It is necessary that every man experience an earthquake once in his lifetime and that he experience in his heart something similar to what happened in nature at the moment of Christ’s death—the curtain of the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom, the rocks split, and the tombs were opened. It is necessary that a holy fear of God once and for all shatter our hearts, which are so self-confident in spite of everything. Peter the apostle experienced something like this, and he was able to cry out those tremendous words to the multitude because he had first cried them to himself and had “wept bitterly” when Jesus looked at him (Luke 22:62). In the reading of the passion, we hear these words from John’s Gospel: “They shall look on him whom they have pierced” (19:37). May this prophecy be realized in us too; let us look on him whom we have pierced and mourn for him as one mourns for an only child (cf. Zechariah 12:10). If the world is not converted by listening to us preachers of the gospel, let it be converted by seeing us weep and mourn!
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