Fulton Sheen: When Eternity Touches the Cross

Holy Week draws us into the deepest mystery of our faith: the God who enters time to redeem it, and who fills all space to sanctify it. Padre Pio once revealed this truth with startling simplicity. When asked why he was praying for the holy death of his grandfather — a man who had died decades earlier — he answered, “God knew twenty years ago that I would be here praying today.” That from a Saint with deep faith.

In that single line, Padre Pio unveiled the mystery of the Alpha and the Omega: The God for whom all moments are present, all prayers are timely, and nothing entrusted to Him is ever lost.

To call God Alpha and Omega is not to place Him at the beginning and end of a timeline. It is to confess that He contains all time within Himself. Every moment — past, present, and future — is held in His eternal “now.” What seems late to us is never late to Him. What we fear is beyond reach is already known, already touched, already embraced by the One who stands outside the sequence we call history. 

But the mystery deepens. If God is Lord of every moment, He is also Lord of every place. His omnipresence is not a poetic abstraction — it is the very structure of reality. There is no corner of creation where He is absent, no exile too far, no grave too deep. The God who holds all time also fills all space. This is why a prayer whispered in Iowa can touch a soul at judgment decades earlier. This is why the Cross, planted on a hill outside Jerusalem, radiates through every century and every continent. This is why Holy Week is not a memory but a participation.

Calvary is the moment that breaks the barrier of time and space.(i) Its power flows backward to generations long dead and forward to generations not yet born. Padre Pio prayed into the past for his grandfather; the prophets prayed into the future for a people they would never see. The Old Testament - Samuel vowed it would be a sin to cease praying for Israel’s future. Isaiah wrote for “a people yet unborn.” And if we are a faltering nation or a fractured generation, it is not because God has withdrawn His grace, but because we have not prayed forward as they did — for our families, for our children, for the nursery of the individual and the sovereignty of the nation. Love demands this of us. For if the living does not intercede for the future, who will? And what is our small love compared to the Great Love revealed on Calvary — the love of a Father for His only begotten Son, offered for the salvation of the world? That love, lifted up on the Cross, is the force that gathers all time into God’s eternal present. It is the love that redeems the past, secures the future, and summons every generation to rise.

And here we confront one of the great misunderstandings of the Trinity. The Trinity is not a distant heavenly committee. It is the eternal life of God poured into time and space. The Father is the Source. The Son is the Word made flesh. The Spirit is the Breath who fills creation. And in the Ascension, Christ does not leave us — He enters fully into the omnipresent life of God. He ascends not to depart but to be everywhere. He rises not to escape time but to become Lord of all time. The humanity He assumed is now taken into the eternal communion of the Trinity, so that no human suffering, no human death, no human story is ever outside the reach of God.

Yet as Fulton J. Sheen warned, the greatest resistance in every age is the same resistance Christ faced on Calvary. They were willing to accept anything — His miracles, His teachings, even His claims about the Trinity — anything but the Cross. And Sheen said the same temptation confronts the Church today. We hear it in the demand that the Church “change with the times,” soften her doctrines, modernize her morality, or dilute her witness. But is this not simply another version of the ancient cry from the passersby: “Come down from the Cross, and we will believe!” The world will accept Christ the teacher, Christ the healer, Christ the philosopher — but not Christ the Crucified.

Sheen said the real drama of history is hidden in two words shouted on Calvary: down and up.

The crowd cried down — down to earth, down to comfort, down to the level of human demands. But from the hill of Calvary there echoed another word Christ had spoken in anticipation of His Passion: “If I be lifted up, I will draw all things to Myself.”

In these two words — down and up — Sheen said the entire problem of freedom is revealed. The loss of freedom is always a downward movement, a descent into the narrow confines of our own desires. True liberty is upward — the ascent to God, the surrender to grace, the rising into the life of the Spirit.

“True liberty,” Sheen taught, “consists not in what we demand of God — namely, that He come down — but in what God demands of us;

namely, that we come up… up to the God of Life, up to the freedom of the Spirit, even when hanging on a cross. Up! Up! Up! to God!”

Freedom Under God, 1940

And here the mystery of the Alpha and the Omega reaches its deepest consequence: the God who holds all time in His eternal now invites us into that same upward movement. What we surrender is taken up into His life. What we cling to remains bound to the dust. As Fulton Sheen taught, sanctity is the great exchange in which Christ takes what is ours and gives us what is His — our humanity for His divinity, our time for His eternity, our bonds for His freedom, our death for His life (ii). The Eternal does not simply contain our moments — He transforms them. Every fear offered becomes courage. Every wound entrusted becomes mercy. Every cross embraced becomes a doorway into the freedom Sheen described: the rising of the soul toward God.

Yet this truth must be spoken with precision: What is surrendered to the Eternal is taken up into the Eternal, where nothing perishes — except sin, which cannot enter His treasury. Sin is not gathered; it is consumed. It is not preserved; it is undone. Only what is freely offered in love is taken up into the everlasting life of God.

Thus, the upward cry of Calvary becomes the pattern of our own freedom: whatever we lift to God is lifted into God. Whatever we surrender is gathered into His eternal present. And whatever we refuse to surrender remains only what it is — dust returning to dust.

This is why Christ does not come down. Because coming down would be human. Remaining on the Cross is divine.

And this is where Sheen’s prophetic voice becomes a summons for our time: “As others are leaving, we will be stronger. The Lord is keeping reserves. He is training us. We’ll make the entry. We’ll prepare for a new Church. And He is with us — we’ve already won, only the news has not yet leaked out.”

The victory is already accomplished in the eternal life of the Trinity. The Cross is not defeat

— it is the axis where time and eternity meet, where omnipresence becomes intimacy,

where Alpha and Omega embrace the world.

And this brings us to the most tender truth of all: God is embraceable not because He is small, but because the Infinite chose to draw near. The God who fills all time and all space became flesh so that love could be touched, held, and returned. The arms stretched on Calvary are the arms of the Eternal made reachable for every generation. And in that embrace, He awakens in us the very capacity He commands — to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind, and to love our neighbor as ourselves (Luke 10:27).

And who taught you to love yourself except the warm embrace of the God who loved you first and made you for this very purpose? Our true place is at the foot of the Cross, where every question can be asked and every wound can be shown. Ask away — He answered the thief who stole paradise with nothing but a plea and a turning of the heart. So, He will answer you. For the God who commands love is the God who gives love, the God who bends low enough for sinners to touch Him, the God who makes the broken whole by drawing them into His own divine life.

We are finite, God is infinite — and the wonder of the Cross is that the Infinite bends low to lift the finite into His own life.

And so, the prophets speak into this night. Isaiah declares that the day will come when every knee shall bow and every tongue confess, not by force but by the sheer radiance of truth (Isaiah 45:23). This is the posture of all humankind — the bending of the weary, the bowing of the hopeful, the confession of those who have waited with bated breath for a miracle of divine origin. For when the Infinite becomes intimate, when the God who fills all time steps into our time, the only fitting response is wonder. The world leans forward. Creation holds its breath. And the human heart prepares to rise.

The Infinite God becomes intimate so that finite hearts may learn to love without fear. This is the threshold of the Easter Vigil: the moment when the love of the Father for His only begotten Son breaks open the tomb and teaches the world to love again.

THE EASTER VIGIL — WHERE TIME BENDS TOWARD DAWN

And so, we arrive at the Vigil — the night when time bends, when darkness trembles, when the Church stands between the ages holding a single flame. On this night, the Alpha and the Omega steps out of the tomb. The One who fills all time enters our time. The One who fills all space walks into our world. The One who would not come down from the Cross now rises from the grave.

Christ is not merely alive.

He is present.

He is here.

He is Lord of every moment you regret and every moment you fear.

He is Lord of every place you have fled and every place you have fallen.

He is the God who fills all things — even death — and leaves them transformed.

This is the night when the Church becomes an Easter people —

• a people who refuse despair,
• a people who stand in the dark with a flame that will not go out,
• a people who know that the tomb is not the end but the threshold.

This is why we do not lose heart.

This is why we do not fear the future.

This is why we stand at the empty tomb with hope that cannot be shaken.

Because the victory has already been won.

Only the news has not yet leaked out.

And so we go forth as an Easter people,

carrying in our finite hearts the Infinite Love

that bent low to lift every generation into His eternal life.

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i. Foundations for a Cross That Touches Every Generation

Drawing upon Scripture and the metaphysical clarity of Fulton J. Sheen’s God and Intelligence (1925)—originally titled The Finite Notion of God—this section anchors the manuscript in the enduring truth that the Eternal God fills all time. Sheen’s reflections in pages 51–55 illuminate the limits of every finite conception of God and reveal the Cross as the meeting place of eternity and history. Alongside this philosophical foundation, Daniel 4:3 and Psalm 78:4 frame the Cross as God’s generational gift: a dominion that endures from age to age and a testimony entrusted to the faithful for those yet to come. Together, these sources establish the theological and scriptural ground on which the entire manuscript stands.

ii. Fulton J. Sheen: The World’s Greatest Need, January 31, 1932. “Sanctity is not giving up the world. It is a continuation of that sublime transaction of the Incarnation in which Christ said to man: “You give Me your humanity, I will give you, My Divinity. You give Me your time, I will give you, My Eternity. You give Me your bonds, I will give you, My freedom. You give Me your death, I will give you, My life. You give Me your nothingness; I will give you My all.” And the consoling thought throughout this whole transforming process is that it does not require much time to make us saints: it requires only much love.

“A reflection on innocence, penitence, and the priesthood—where the Cross meets the human heart and calls every generation back to God.”