St. Augustine once wrote that, “Nothing great is ever achieved without suffering.”  These words remind us that discipleship  always has a cost. No Christian ever lives the Gospel without eventually encountering the cross.

In giving His life for us, Jesus asks us to live our lives for others. He asks us to share in His work of redemption. That’s why the Gospel is never merely a call to be “nice” to others. There’s nothing sweet about Golgotha. Life in Jesus Christ is a call to heroic and self-sacrificing love. If we want to rise with Jesus on Easter, we also have to share His work of salvation on Good Friday.

C.S. Lewis captured this basic Christian understanding very clearly when he wrote that, “Christianity is a thing of unspeakable joy. But it begins not in joy, but in wretchedness, and it does no good to try to get to the joy by bypassing the wretchedness.”

Of course, the nature of everyday America in 2017 is that we all     live our lives in routines — routines that tend to dull us into self-absorption at work, at play, in our families, and also in our     religious faith. Even the broken body of Christ on the cross can become a standard piety, an object of devotion that doesn’t really touch our hearts. That’s why we must take time to wake up from our routines and shake off the distractions of daily life — and to concentrate on the One in whom we anchor our hope.

It important to listen to the Word of God with new ears. Make some personal room for silence. Read and pray over the Gospels. Venerate the cross. Remember the price paid for your redemption.Understand how zealously God loves you . . . and when you do, you’ll begin to understand the meaning of the Gospel and the urgency of your own vocation to bring the fruit of God’s love — new life in Jesus Christ — to others.

Fr. Dan