Freely suffering

Mentally, I'm still on Good Friday. I realized something this year, on Good Friday, about what Jesus endured for us, that I think had never really struck me before: that the suffering He faced, He walked through of His own volition. He says as much to His disciples: "do you think that I cannot now pray to My Father, and He will provide me with more than twelve legions of angels?" (Mt. 26:53). It is one thing to endure sufferings when one is forced into them and has no way of escape, but must simply persevere; it is another thing altogether to continue to embrace those sufferings when it is completely within one's power to avoid them - and that is precisely what Christ did.

(Tangentially, I think that the value of fasting may lie in this very truth - that Christ walked through every moment of His sufferings intentionally and deliberately - because in fasting we also choose to take up suffering and embrace it, even though at any time we could choose to step out of our suffering back into bodily comfort and pleasure. So in fasting our understanding of Christ's suffering for us can grow experientially, not just intellectually, even though the suffering is comparatively so small. The spiritual and physical discipline may also help us to be able to endure greater sufferings in the future, ones that we have not chosen and cannot escape, but I can't speak to that personally.)

Anyway, the fact that Jesus did indeed walk through that suffering freely - compelled only by His love for us and for His Father - demonstrates the incredible depth and greatness of that love. The verse that has lingered in my mind all through Holy Week is the one with which the apostle John begins his telling of the great story, as the disciples gather together to celebrate the Passover with Jesus for the last time:

"Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that His hour had come that He should depart from this world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end." - John 13:1 (emphasis added)

 His love truly is the love that does not fail. Even when faced with the cross, it did not fail, and He loved us to the end. And that, I think, is the most wonderful foundation on which to build the rest of my life: on the love of Jesus, that will never let me down, and which led Him to die that I might know God, and in knowing God find life.