Today’s Gospel reading reveals the depths of divine love through Jesus’ suffering and sacrifice. This passage is enormously long! As we stand to listen to the Gospel proclaimed during Mass, you may feel your knees buckle a little or your back begin to ache. Small children in the pews will fiddle and whine. Altar servers’ arms will grow tired from holding their candles. You will also feel your heart break as we recall Jesus' pain and suffering, our contribution to His pain, and the profundity of His love for us. The physical discomfort that you’ll likely experience at Mass today is part of the genius of the Catholic liturgy. The twinges of pain or discomfort that we experience while listening to Matthew’s account of the Passover meal, Jesus’ agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, his trial, passion, death, and burial, is part of the point. We may offer our discomfort as a miniscule, participation in Jesus’ crucible ordeal. By the mere act of standing for the Gospel, we may draw closer to Jesus’ cross and understand his profligate and sacrificial love for us more fully. Entering into Holy Week, we have just a few more days to rededicate ourselves to our Lenten penances, mortifications, and fasts, to get to confession, and to prepare our hearts for Easter. Throughout Lent, and especially as we listen to today’s Gospel, our hearts are filled with compassion and gratitude for Jesus’ suffering. Our Lenten offerings may not have been easy, as suffering rarely is, but our physical work truly prepares our hearts and souls to receive all that Jesus offers us. Though today’s Gospel passage is full of trials, Jesus, as a deliberate and loving participant in humanity’s redemption, also reminds us of God’s goodness. Jesus promises us that goodness prevails. During the Passover meal, Jesus gives the disciples His body and blood. And on the cross He offers that same body and blood in death for the salvation of all. As the baptized Christians, we participate sacramentally in Jesus’ death and resurrection. Entering into the waters of baptism, we die to sin, and emerging, we rise incorporated into Jesus’ divine sonship. This is a sonship whereby we participate in the life of Jesus eternally. We know that without the cross there is no resurrection. Rather than avoid suffering this week, let us unite our sufferings to Jesus and prepare our hearts for Easter’s victory over death and the opening of the promise of heaven.