Isaiah 63:9

It was not a messenger or an angel,
but he himself who saved them.
Because of his love and pity
he redeemed them himself,
Lifting them and carrying them
all the days of old.

Philippians 2:6-11

Brothers and sisters:
Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God something to be grasped.
Rather, he emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
coming in human likeness;
and found human in appearance,
he humbled himself,
becoming obedient to death,
even death on a cross.
Because of this, God greatly exalted him
and bestowed on him the name
that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

What Makes Us Loyal to Christ, by Dom Vonier

We are dealing with the deepest and most incomprehensible of things when we are dealing with the human spirit, with the human mind. How can the human mind be won to truth, to faith, to loyalty to God? How is it possible for us to come to God, to surrender to him our whole intellect, our whole will? We do not even ourselves know why we are loyal to one person and alienated from another, in sympathy with one person and opposed to another. God alone knows the working of the human soul; and God, who knows, who has made us, has thought out his plan, the supreme plan, the good testimony of Christ before Pilate. In the words of Saint Peter: "Christ died for our sins, the just for the unjust." And by his death he achieved for truth its highest ascendency, an ascendency not otherwise to be obtained. Here again we see the genius of Christianity, a wonderful understanding, we might almost say, on the part of God himself, of man's real needs, man's real hunger, and thirst... The folly of the cross is a great psychological power, a great instrument of truth, which wins us and makes us loyal to Christ himself; nothing else can achieve that... We know what a Christian man ought to be. Your life, such as it is, is a pre-ordained thing, and it is for you to drink your cup even as Christ drank his. His life and his death, if they apparently were failures, were not so in reality. We also are children of that divine Father who held to the lips of his Son a beverage to drink, and so our lives have a wonderful mysterious significance. And it is in this light that we ought to look at human things and be superior to them; never letting them overpower us, as if they were some dark arrangement, as if they were the result of some malign power. No, human things are the will of the Father for us as they were the will of the Father for his divine Son.

Dom Anscar Vonier, O.S.B. (died 1906) was the abbot of Buckfast Abbey in Devon, England.

Suffering

When Peter objected to Jesus' prediction of his passion, he did not yet know the end of the story. Our faith, illuminated by the resurrection, is challenged to see the cross not as death but life, not as defeat but victory, not as tragedy but triumph. We can see that transformation in Jesus' story. Can we trust that it lies at the heart of our own?

Isaiah 52:13-15

See, my servant shall prosper,
he shall be raised high and greatly exalted.
Even as many were amazed at him --
so marred was his look beyond that of man,
and his appearance beyond that of mortals --
So shall he startle many nations,
because of him kings shall stand speechless;
For those who have not been told shall see,
those who have not heard shall ponder it.

St. Gregory of Nyssa's word portrait of Christ

Christ is the artist, tenderly wiping away all the grime of sin that disfigures the human face and restoring God's image to its full beauty.

Follow Me, by Father Bede Jarrett, O.P.

Jesus knew human nature as we cannot know it. He knew its baseness, as we even do not know it; he knew its frailty, its inconsistency. Yet, knowing it, he dared to say to us: "Follow me." How well he thought of us, how nobly he judged us who said to us, "Come where I go, follow me to the heights of self-sacrifice that I have climbed." He would not have said that unless he meant it, unless he knew that we could. He was no dreamer. He knew mankind. He knew the shallowness of those who then followed him and of those who would follow him, but he knew also their depth, their greatness. And knowing this he calls all of us to follow him.