I don’t know how I shall be able to describe, for I feel so ill with heart trouble that I cannot remain seated except with difficulty. It’s really difficult. I must describe what I see. I receive light on today’s Gospel: the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost.574
What effort! I really can’t manage....
At 4 p.m., when I recovered a little, I wrote what I had had to write since last night. I was observing the Hour of Mary’s Desolation, which I could not observe on Friday night, and, while contemplating Jesus lying on the marble of the stone for anointing, with his Mother alongside, weeping and kissing his pierced hands, I noticed - and wondered why - Jesus’ face right after death - that is, when He was placed on that stone - looked more like the face of the living Jesus, in its thinness and beauty, than it did on the road to Calvary, on the Cross, and as it later appears on the Turin Shroud. Older and wearier, but slender and noble, as usual.
Jesus replied to me:
“Because on the road to Calvary I was heated, tumescent, with my veins protruding from fever and exhaustion, and with an initial swelling already from the retention of urea, following upon the atrocious scourging. On the Cross all of that further increased. After death, when the agony had ceased and fluids had been partially emptied out, both naturally and from the lance thrust, my face suddenly thinned. The lavacre of my Mother’s tears also served to restore a more habitual appearance to my face.
“But on the Turin Shroud the face of someone dead for several hours appears. The usual process of edema had already begun, then, all the more intense in someone killed with torture like mine. It is the transudates spreading from the serous membranes which make you say that a dead person looks the way he did when alive. It is the great pacification which death extends over even the most tortured faces.
“In addition, consider that the image appears on a cloth and is fixed upon it through a process of natural aromas and salts. You know that any stain on a cloth appears prone to expand. But in reality the features of my face on the morning of the Resurrection - that is, when I ceased to be covered by the Turin Shroud - were swollen in this way.
“Life returned to the Living One. But during those forty hours I was quite dead and in no way different from every man who is a prey to death. I did not decompose because of the swift Resurrection. But my body was subject to the rules common to dead bodies, especially those dying of innumerable wounds. I as Victim wanted to annihilate Myself in this respect, too. All decomposition begins with swelling. Let this be directed to all who still have doubts about the veracity of my death.”
I am certain He said this because He has now repeated it to me, since I was afraid I would not write with precision after a number of hours.
574 There follows a text concerning the episode of “Jesus’ Weeping over Jerusalem,” which has been included in the Passion cycle.