Second Week of Lent: Friday - Traditional Lenten Meditation

Practical Meditations For Every Day in the Year on the Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ composed chiefly for the Use of Religious by a Father of the Society of Jesus. First translated from the French, 1868. Though primarily intended for Religious, the devout layman will find the Practical Meditations a most serviceable and bracing form of Spiritual Exercise amounting in fact to something like the daily practice of a Retreat.

SECOND WEEK OF LENT: FRIDAY
Jesus delivered by His People to Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor

1st Prelude. Look at our Divine Lord passing along with His hands bound, amidst the hooting multitude, towards the palace of the Roman governor.

2nd Prelude. Beg for a more fervent love of your Blessed Saviour.


POINT I. "And when morning was come, all the chief priests and ancients of the people took counsel against Jesus, that they might put Him to death."

CONSIDERATION. Hastily and eagerly, before the day broke, the unjust judges roused themselves from sleep, and assembled together. Their only motive was to satisfy their hatred against their innocent Victim, and to carry out their plan for putting Him to death. How diligent they were to accomplish their terrible crime!

APPLICATION. We ought to blush with shame when we see how much more earnest these wicked men were in doing evil than we often are in doing good. They were much more ready to rise early that they might take counsel how to put Jesus to death than we are that we may give Him glory by our prayer and by our visits to the Sacrament of His love.

AFFECTIONS and RESOLUTIONS

POINT II. "And they brought him bound, and delivered Him to Pontius Pilate, the governor."

CONSIDERATION. It was His own people who rejected our Lord, and delivered Him to the Gentiles; those very people on whom He had poured so many blessings, and who had cried out in wonder at His gracious miracles, "He hath done all things well: He hath made both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak." Great indeed was their treachery and ingratitude; and what an additional humiliation and grief this must have been to our Divine Lord!

APPLICATION. There is not a heart that does not swell with indignation at the remembrance of the treacherous ingratitude of the Jews; but are not many Christians equally as wicked when, by sacrilegious Communions, they deliver Jesus to the company of the evil one, who reigns over their hearts; and when, by their sins, they daily return evil for good to that loving Saviour from whom they have received a thousand times more graces and favours than did the Jews?

AFFECTIONS and RESOLUTIONS


POINT III. "They went not into the hall, that they might not be defiled."

CONSIDERATION. How astonishing were the false consciences and blindness of these men! They were well instructed in their religion, yet they demurred about contracting a legal stain by entering the house of a heathen, and were not afraid to indulge their envy and hatred by conspiring against the life of an innocent Man.

APPLICATION. Are there not many people, and those even in religious life, who scrupulously observe indifferent matters, and who either neglect, or seldom attend to, essential ones; who are faithful to certain self-chosen pious practices, but who do not mind omitting their obligations? Are there not others also who pique themselves on their regularity in exteriors, whilst they neglect interior matters? Are not all these people misled by a false conscience? Have we nothing to reproach ourselves with on these heads? Let us make a detailed and careful examination of conscience.

COLLOQUY with Jesus.