The Path of the Beloved Son Is Highly Unfavorable – A Friend in Need Is a Friend Indeed

By all accounts, Jesus appeared to be the unfavored Son of God, especially as He drew closer and closer to fulfilling His Father’s will by dying on the cross.

The three years of His ministry reveal a descent into disfavor with the Pharisees, who condemned Him all the more as He healed the sick and preached the Gospel. The more Jesus did His Father’s will, the closer He came to His shameful death on the cross.

For Jesus—the example for all Christians—the path the Father willed for Him was going to mean something illogical. It would mean suffering punishment that bore no reflection on the life He had lived. It would mean being sinless, yet punished as if He were the most sinful man in the world.

Something I learned in a homily a while back is that when Jesus died on the cross, He did not only take on punishment for our sins, but something even deeper—something revealed in His cry of abandonment to the Father.

When Jesus took on sins that were not His but ours, He assumed the full weight and consequences of those sins—the very effects that separate humanity from God. Before His Father, He was, in every sense, abandoned to the consequences of those sins, cut off from His Father. When He cried out on the cross, He was experiencing the reality of mortal sin— separation from God—without ever having committed it Himself.

Because of this experience of becoming sin, Jesus is truly the God who can sympathize with us, even in our self-inflicted pain. Even when we deserve the effects of our sins, Jesus can still sympathize, because He felt all of it and knows the full misery of human suffering, even when it is self-induced.

When Jesus said to take up our crosses and follow Him, He was letting us know in advance that following Him means we, too, will share—in measure with our unique crosses—what it means to be beloved sons or daughters of God and yet appear highly disfavored in the world.

The irony of the believer’s journey is that, at some point, the closer you draw to God’s will, the more unfavored you might appear, at least for a time.

To walk the shameful path of the cross challenged everything the world expected of the Messiah. In the eyes of the world, the Leader—the Face of the People—should have been destined for man’s favor.

But not so for the beloved Son of God, who instead became a “worm” in the eyes of man.
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For someone following God’s will, an encounter with suffering is not shocking or unusual. It is a point on the spiritual journey where you and Jesus finally walk side by side with your crosses, meeting together at Calvary. It is a moment when your following of Christ has reached the place where you can look to your side and see Jesus looking back at you.

It is the point on the journey where Jesus looks at you in thankful solace—that He is not alone on Calvary.

We find evidence of this sentiment in the solace He found with the Good Thief beside Him on the cross—the one who did not mock Jesus but spoke lovingly of Him, even in his suffering.
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You can almost hear the grateful exultation—a sigh of “at last!”—in Jesus’ voice when He responds to the Good Thief and promises that that day—that very day—they will be together in Paradise.

Whoever is a true friend to Jesus and follows Him with their own cross will be richly rewarded, no matter their past sins. The Beloved Son of the Father knows what it is to be utterly unfavored, and those who dare to meet Him there will never be forgotten.