Continuing in my body what lacks from the passion of Christ

Living God’s dream is the most wonderful thing that we can experience. It can bring us an ever-ending joy. Eternal joy. However, this does not mean that we won’t’ have difficult moments. For the Christian, the Cross is the means to reach union with God. Christ himself told us, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.  For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it” (Luke 9:23-24).

Pope John Paul II explains, “In human life, suffering signifies a test of the human spirit’s strength. Such a test has a ‘liberating’ significance: it liberates the spirit’s hidden strengths and allows them to appear. At the same time, it becomes an occasion of interior purification. The words of the parable of the vine and the branches told by Jesus are relevant here, especially when he presents the Father as the one who cultivates the vineyard: ‘Every branch of mine that does bear fruit he prunes that it may bear more fruit’ (John 15:2). That fruit depends on remaining (like a branch) in Christ the vine, in his redemptive sacrifice, because ‘apart from him we can do nothing’ (cf. John 15:5) […].  In this way the Christian’s gradual transformation according to the model of Christ is accomplished” (John Paul II, Jesus is our model, General audience, 17 Aug. 1988).

Thus in carrying our Cross, following the example of Christ, helps us to take off that which is not Christ in us. More than this, the carrying of the cross helps us complete what “is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Colossians 1:24). Through this purification that happens due to the will and strength of God and Christ’s own passion, you can one day say with Saint Paul, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:19-20). This union with God in Christ that might come out of the purification of the cross makes it worth it to endure such a burden, since in relation to this union everything else is “rubbish”  (cf. Philippians 3:7-8). 

In front of such a prize waiting for us, we have nothing else to do, other than to “Fight the good fight of the faith” (1 Timothy 6:12), in order to  “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,  but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:5-8).