Jesus says:
“Tell me: who shows greater courage, the person undergoing an operation which he endures with anesthetics or the person enduring it without help? The operation is the same. The instruments used are the same. Their action on flesh, nerves, and organs is the same. The purpose is the same. And let us also grant that the result of healing is the same. But which of the two people operated on has had greater strength of character and has, of course, prompted admiration? Certainly the one who, without any chemical assistance, endures the work of the surgeons with full sensitivity, without rebelling with cries, imprecations, or unseemly words, but limiting himself to moaning, for that is human and comprehensible.
“Well then, let us move on to the spiritual field. Which of two souls will prompt more admiration and thus praise, which turns into a certain reward? The one for whom a miraculous action by Me attenuates the agony by anesthetizing it spiritually or the one who has God as a good Father alongside the operating table, but no longer as a Father and Friend who shows pity for and watches over and weeps with that soul, but who intervenes with direct aid aiming to daze the painfulness? Certainly the latter one.
“You are this latter one. Do not ask, ‘Why?’ I spared you in October.483 I helped you because I needed you to be still capable of this calvary. If you had been cut off by torment since October, you would not have withstood an hour of this current torment. And I needed this suffering of yours.
“The angels cannot suffer for their God to increase his glory or for their neighbors to obtain good for them. But men can do so. For the angels, to do the will of God is to do something joyful. To do the will of God, for men, is to do something painful. It is to do what I did. Yes, when pain bears the name of holocaust and is not only resignation, but union with the will of God, just as my Body was united to the cross, through love, generosity, and patience - the three nails pegging Me to their holy scaffold - you do what I did.
“Don’t worry if you cry. I, too, cried. I, too, moaned. With the repugnance of my flesh and mind I said, ‘Let your will be mine.’484 But I said it. My spirit alone had the courage to go on saying it. But I said it. In the midst of the repugnance and fear of your body and your thought, let your spirit sing - while the cruel operation which will yield good is being carried out without any help - let your spirit sing, ‘Lord, may your will be mine.’
“And believe, too, that your reward will be twofold, threefold, tenfold what it would have been if you had already received gifts of mercy in your suffering. God is just. For a twofold merit, a twofold reward. For total merit, a total reward. “Do not fear. Go in peace.”
483 Cf. the entry for June 21.
484 Luke 22:41-42.