He Loves Us to the End

In these holy days, Jesus embraces the great mystery of his Passion; he "loves us to the end." He gives himself to us on the Cross, and in the Eucharist, with a love that goes beyond all our ideas and expectations. Jesus becomes the companion of all our sufferings, and he unites himself to every person's death.

None of us knows when we will die. We receive every moment of every day as a gift from God for the fulfillment of our own vocations. Each of us is a unique person, a mystery whose life is held by the wisdom and goodness and mercy of God. The moment of death—that final moment in the history of our becoming "who we are"—is also God's gift, designed to correspond to the fulfillment of the unique calling that each of us has received. It is the passage to the whole encounter with the Destiny that defines every moment of our lives.

In Jesus that Destiny embraces our death from within, becomes a presence within its solitude, and transforms it into a moment of hope and self-abandoning love. What might otherwise seem like the loss of "myself" becomes, in union with Jesus, a moment to give myself over wholly to the Father in complete trust.

The inevitable horizon of death encourages us to live every moment in trusting self-abandonment, in union with the One who said, "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit."

Being a Christian means that even now "I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. And the life I live in the flesh I live in faith in the Son of God who loved me, and gave Himself for me" (Galatians 2:20)