One of life’s great scandals is pain. Not only in ourselves but in others. Pain will always be a trouble to the human mind as well as to the human body. How did our Lord look upon it? When he went into the Garden of Gethsemane on Holy Thursday night, there was an alternative presented to him: the alternative of the sword and the cup.
As he abandons himself to his Father’s will, coming down on this moonlit night is a band of about 200 led by Judas. Peter takes out a sword to defend our blessed Lord…. Our Lord said to Peter, ‘Put the sword back again into its scabbard. Shall I not drink the cup my Father gave?’ asks Jesus. ‘My Father’? Not Pilate? Not Herod? Not you and me? Not the people? Is this the cup the loving Father gives? That’s precisely the point.
All pains, all trials of life pass through God’s hands first, before they ever come to us. Before Satan could strike Job, God reviewed the punishments that Satan would visit upon Job and said ‘You may touch everything except his soul.’ And so what our blessed Lord is saying is that the pains that we have are seen and known by the Father. That was the way he looked on pain.
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