The suffering of Jesus is a very human thing. The people he came to love, the system he meant to stretch to its human limits, to its fullest potential, to its deepest vision of God, turned against him. We have all known the situation, the feeling, the pain. It is what people did to Jesus that killed him. It is what the system did to him that destroyed him. It was a fearful system and apathetic people that brought the total sacrifice of Godhead to an ultimate end. It is what people did—or failed to do—for the One who had already sacrificed everything for our sakes, who “did not deign being equal to God a thing to be clung to but who became like us in everything,” that led to his death. This is the suffering that takes all the love a human being has. This is the kind of suffering that is divine mystery nobly, humanly, borne.

Jesus does not come to appease God. Jesus comes to teach us how to live a life that makes us worthy of the God who made us. Jesus comes to show us what we ourselves can be, must be. Jesus comes so that we can come to be everything we were created to be, whenever our lives, wherever our efforts, whatever our circumstance: shining glory of human degradation.

The truth of the passion rings across time for each of us: The goal we each seek is the cross we each choose. The purpose of our lives determines the nature of our deaths. What we stood for in life determines who will be at our deathbeds, how we will be regarded by the “nice” people of the time, the degree of respect with which we will be held thereafter. Jesus lived the human cross with us, for us. We have a companion on the way.

—from In Search of Belief by Joan Chittister (Liguori)