That shows how the very notion of a suffering Messiah was a scandal to the Church, even in its earliest days. That is not the kind of Lord it wants, and as the Church of Christ it does not like to have the law of suffering imposed upon it by its Lord. Peter's protest displays his own unwillingness to suffer, and that means that Satan has gained entry into the Church, and is trying to tear it away from the cross of its Lord.

The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15.34). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us.

She smiled and her face was heartbreaking.

The mother instinct is something of which I am completely devoid. I explain it like this to myself: life is a vale of tears and all human beings are miserable creatures, so I cannot take the responsibility for bringing yet another unhappy creature into the world.

Our faith is anchored to a miscarriage of justice. The worst possible thing happened to the best possible person.

Until that moment, I only saw Jesus as the Son of God. I knew he had come down to earth, but that night for the first time it dawned on me: He understands me. He walked in my shoes! As a matter of fact, he was sort of a toogee. You know? His daddy — his earthly father — wasn't his real daddy. He slept in the straw as a child. He was ridiculed and abused. They chased him and tried to kill him.

For to be in one's right mind causes grief: but madness is an ill; yet it is better to perish, nothing knowing of one's ills.

Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it

She looks at him once more, with infinite longing, infinite sadness.

By becoming one of the poor who was deprived of his rights, by dying as one of those robbed of justice, God's Son submitted to the utmost extremity of humiliation, entering into total solidarity with those who are without help.

They sought to pummel His pride, not understanding He'd laid it aside at birth, when He gave up heaven and came to earth.

From earliest childhood, an arrow of grief has been embedded in my heart. As long as it remains there, I am ironic — if it is drawn out, I will die.