Resurrection is Good News! Paul reminds us that the pattern of love includes life, suffering and death because love is such an amazing gift! To do away with it completely would be to choose the pattern of power over the pattern of love. There can be no love without suffering, because love always demands an element of self-sacrifice and will always bring with it renunciation and pain. Suffering and pain reshape us and free us from existential emptiness toward a fullness of life. This calls for a conversion that entrusts oneself to the love of the Other, a love that becomes the measure and the criteria of ones own life. As Christians we do not retreat into a private salvation for individual souls or shift the focus of human concern to the beyond. “The Christian is the one who unites the constantly experienced dispossession of self with the fundamental attitude of a being created for love, a being that knows itself to be safe precisely when it trust in the un-exacted gifts of love." “When we know that the way of love–this exodus, this going out of oneself–is the true way by which man becomes human, then we also understand that suffering is the process through which we mature. Anyone who has inwardly accepted suffering becomes more mature and more understanding of others becomes more human. Anyone who has consistently avoided suffering does not understand other people; he becomes hard and selfish.” Jesus fulfilled the pattern of love beyond all expectation. Christ, the Exodus of God, does not die in noble detachment; he died in tears, in isolation and abandonment accepting the cup of being human, down to the last dregs. Pain and death are transformed into increase of life. Christ extinguishes their sting through the plenary power of unlimited love. Death is vanquished where people die with Christ and into him. “Jesus’ actions, words, sufferings, break the power of that alienation which lies so heavily on human life” bringing us into communion with God the locus of true life. Amen! Love is stronger than death! Love has released us for eternal Life.
Quotes from Joseph Ratzinger
