The great warriors of the world have blood on their hands, bearing the blood of the unfair and also the blood of the innocent in the name of justice. Our Lord has blood on his hands too. But it is his own blood, finally absorbing the toxic pain of our stupidity so that we do not have to do so.

Blind as we are, it was the cross and not the crown that won our love. It didn’t have to be that way. But love found a way, through smallness, through humiliation, a canal dug by God from the ocean of his love to our own little pond of pettiness in the hopes of changing things.

In this story, everything is reversed. The king becomes the servant, the rich one becomes a beggar, and the owner becomes homeless. The liberator becomes the oppressed, the freedom fighter becomes the person bound, the priest becomes the sacrifice, the original author of joy itself becomes the one so severely tortured.