“Look at me on the cross, see how I keep my gaze fixed on the Father” (Inner Word).
Both during His earthly life and at the hour of His death, Our Lord kept His gaze fixed on the Father. Everything was centred on Him: the Father: He carried out His mission to the end to accomplish the Father’s work, and His longing was to return to Him.
By immersing ourselves in this gaze of the Lord on the Cross, we enter more deeply into the relationship of love between the Father and the Son. In the most extreme hour of abandonment, which is also the hour of His greatest test of love, Jesus has no other desire than to glorify God through His obedience to death. He came to fulfil His will, and it is this will that sustains Him in the difficult hours of His Passion. It is total abandonment to the holy will of the Father.
In following the Lord, we are called to do the same. We must never allow ourselves to be swallowed up by the difficulty of the task we have to accomplish, but always keep our gaze fixed on the Father and remain in an attitude of loving attention to Him. This is especially important in the hours of the Cross. Then, with God’s grace, we will have the strength not to come down from the Cross and to be faithful until death to the mission that the Father has entrusted to us.
We could not do all this on our own, but only in union with the Lord and by keeping our gaze fixed on the Father. We too can long to be united with our Father for all eternity and, on our way there, fix our gaze on the One to whom we are pilgrims, as our Lord did on the Cross.