“Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered; and when he was made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for 

Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross makes him the source of our salvation. When we join him by faith, his sacrifice makes our human suffering powerful for good, charged with hope, and transformed by love. He says, “when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself” (John 12:32).

Have you ever felt judged as a failure? Years ago a woman taking a walk told me that 1 Samuel 16:7 was her favorite bible verse. “God does not see as a mortal, who sees the appearance. The LORD looks into the heart.” This woman had never been successful in her career, so she had an unstable living situation when her mother and father grew old and became sick. Instead of caring for them in her home, she watched them enter a nursing home. She loved her mom and dad. She never wanted them to go to a nursing home. She felt like a failure, because she did not have what it would take to care for her mom and dad at home. It meant a lot to her to know God knew her heart. He knew how much she had loved her parents and what she wanted to do for them. As Jesus offers his sacrifice, people mocked him for failing as a king, and we learn that life’s measure is not success and failure in human terms, but love.

Have you felt nervous, unqualified, worried, your mind racing? Caryll Houselander suffered from anxiety. During the Blitz, she lived in London while the bombs fell nightly, and had to go out to work in first aid stations. One day she realized: “As long as I try not to be afraid I shall be worse, and I shall show it one day and break; what God is asking of me, to do for suffering humanity, is to be afraid, to accept it and put up with it. … I was terrified, but I was also perfectly conscious of being held by God’s hands … I felt that God had put his hand right down through all the well upon well of darkness and horror between Him and me, and was holding the central point of my soul” (as quoted in The Virtue of Hope, Philip Bochanski, p. 125, 128). As Jesus offers his sacrifice, his pierced hand cradles our trembling hearts.

Have you been hurt so deeply that it seems the hurt defeats everything else? On pages 183-186 of Tattoos on the Heart, Fr. Gregory Boyle remembers a mom named Soledad. She said, “I love the two kids I have. I hurt for the two that are gone. … The hurt wins.” Two months later, Soledad is in the emergency room, watching in the bed next to her a young man dying of gunshot wounds. He’s from the gang that killed her two sons. As she watches the doctors struggle and scream, “We’re losing him!”, she starts praying harder than she ever had before: “Please … don’t … let him die. I don’t want his mom to go through what I have.” And the kid lived. Sometimes, it only seems that the hurt wins. As Jesus offers his sacrifice, he prays, “Father, forgive them,” and starts a gift stronger than this world’s cycle of hurts and hurting.

Jesus knows your suffering, loves you, and sees the hope there for you. Guided by him, may you find it.

God bless you!