Each one of us has to find such a relationship in the suffering that we ourselves experience, be it the loss of a job or a home, the death of someone we love, rejection by our parents or our children, the breakdown of a marriage, institutional injustice, social violence or whatever. The causes of our personal suffering are many. And when we find the living, liberating answer that gives us meaning in the midst of suffering, we realize that it is a very personal answer.

The Crucified One is God's standing solidarity with the suffering, the tragedy, and the disaster of all time, and God's promise that it will not have the final word. The Risen One is God's final word about the universe and what God plans to do with all suffering.

Everything you have ever seen with your eyes is the self-emptying of God into multitudinous physical and visible forms. In other words, Infinity is forever limiting itself into finite expressions, and this could even be called the "suffering" of God. The Christ learned this self-emptying, or kenosis , 183 from his eternal life in the Trinity. It is not just Jesus who suffers, but the cross is the visible symbol of what is always going on inside of God!

So Jesus in the throes of his Passion is an image of hope: God is on the side of those who suffer.

But now, I no longer pleaded for anything. I was no longer able to lament. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man. Without love or mercy. I was nothing but ashes now, but I felt myself to be stronger than this Almighty to whom my life had been bound for so long. In the midst of these men assembled for prayer, I felt like an observer, a stranger.

A man who has suffered more than others, and differently, should live apart. Alone. Outside of any organized existence. He poisons the air. He makes it unfit for breathing. He takes away from joy its spontaneity and its justification. He kills hope and the will to live. He is the incarnation of time that negates present and future, only recognizing the harsh law of memory. He suffers and his contagious suffering calls forth echoes around him.

O Sorrow, wilt Thou live with meNo casual mistress, but a wife.

The fourth is the thought of the sorrows that Christ bore gladly for us. If the only Man who ever could choose His fate on earth chose pain, what great value He must have seen in it! So we observe that, borne with serenity and joy, suffering redeems.

And my heart aches, in hopeless pain Exhausted with repinings vain, That I shall greet them ne'er again!

I'm in difficulty, lord, and pitiable: no one cares about me, no one helps me; I'm the object of universal scorn.' [49] Is that the witness you are going to bear, making a mockery of God's summons, when he honoured you and judged you worthy to be his public spokesman?

I'm from Oklahoma City, and there's a statue across from the site of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building of Jesus. It's called 'Jesus Wept.' And I love this statue because it's a statue of Jesus with his head in his hand. And his sadness and his pain at some of the choices that are made here - that just breaks his heart.

The joy of God has gone through the poverty of the manger and the distress of the cross; therefore it is invincible and irrefutable.