So today people are provoked by suffering, and especially innocent suffering whether in themselves or in others – are provoked to reject God, but in so doing they do not realise they are also rejecting the Crucified.  For, as the believing Christian knows, God is a God of love and the measure of his immeasurable love for mankind is shown and proved by the Crucifixion, the price he willingly paid for coming into this world to restore us to himself.  For the purpose of our life in this world is to enable us to share God’s life in the next.  In other words, we are born only that we may be enabled to die so that we may live with him.

If we follow Christ at all, we must be prepared to follow him all the way – not only through the smiling fields and orchards of Galilee but also along the Way of Sorrows in Jerusalem.  Such sorrows may be some of:

“…The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to…” (2);

but for the faithful and resolute Christian there is also added the hostility of the non-Christian world around.  As Jesus put it the night before his Crucifixion, “If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you.  If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own.  Because you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world – therefore the world hates you” (NRSV, John 15:18,19, our emphasis).

Indeed, did not Our Blessed Lord picture his Christian followers as a procession of cross bearers with himself at their head?  And we, like him, can turn suffering to good account: we can try to face it as he did, with courage and patience, and we can offer it to God as a way of expressing our desire to be united with Christ.  For the Christian life is a sharing in the life of Christ, but it has to be in his life as a whole; a sharing not only in his strength and comfort, but also in his sorrow and trouble and pain.