Charles Williams : The New Christian Year

5th Thursday in Lent

When all is done, with this cross thus laid out for me, and taken up by me, I must follow Christ; Christ to his end; his end is his cross; that is, I must bring my cross to his; lay down my cross at the foot of his; confess that there is no dignity, no merit in mine, but as it receives an impression, a sanctification from his.  If I could die a thousand times for Christ, this were nothing, if Christ had not died for me before.

John Donne: Sermons.

Thou dost nowhere depart from us, and we hardly return unto thee.

St. Augustine: Confessions.

God always goes before our contemplation; we can never here overtake him who is our highest beatitude.

Dante: Convivio.

  We fail oftentimes of the sight of him, and anon we fail into our self, and then find we no feeling of right—naught but contrariness that is in our self. . . . And in this we are in travail and tempest with feeling of sins, and of pain in many divers manners, spiritual and bodily, as it is known to us in this life.

Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love.

Pilate saith unto them, What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ? They all say unto him, Let him be crucified.

Matthew 27:22

  He saith what shall I do with the Christ? in this way desiring to put them to the blush, by giving them the power to choose, that at least out of shame they might ask for him, and the whole should be out their bountifulness.

St. Chrysostom: Commentary on St. Matthew.

And the governor said, Why, what evil hath he done? But they cried out the more, saying, Let him be crucified.

Matthew 27:23

  Verily we are even the princpals in this murder, and the Jews and others, on whom we seek to derive it, but only accessories and instrumental causes thereof.

Lancelot Andrewes: Sermon on Good Friday, 1597.

When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it.
   Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.

Matthew 27:24-25

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  If I were not a penitent in my own eyes I should at times have been scandalized by Christianity, but I dare not breathe a word, and so looking back I am reconciled to that which would otherwise have scandalized me.  This is how I understand the words of St. Peter: to whom shall we go?  As they are normally declaimed by parsons they are merely sentimental.  I understand them to mean that the consciousness of sin binds a man to Christianity.  And consequently that is how I understand myself. . . . Now since it is God who binds every individual man to Christianity through the consciousness of sin it must certainly be assumed that he determines the conflict for each one in particular. Thus it is nevertheless the consciousness of sin which binds a man to Christianity.  Anyone who is not thus bound is not bound by Christianity; all the sentimental talk about it being profound, noble, a friend in need and what not, is simply nonsense. . . .
  The relationship must be as profound as that.  Christianity repels in order to attract.  But people water down Christianity, and what it really means to shake up a man as Christianity does, so that the impetus of the consciousness of sin is no longer necessary in order to force one into it: then the whole thing becomes sentimentality.

Søren Kierkegaard: Journals.