Several years ago, a lady volunteered to help me with my English pronunciation. You are very much aware that I need that. One day I could not produce the sound of a word and she tried different ways for me to get it. After several attempts, she puts her arms down and says, “I give up. I surrender”. She gave up with that word, not with helping me.

Surrender. This is what we see on the cross, the perfect surrendering of the Lord to the will of his Heavenly Father. You are familiar with Michelangelo’s Pieta, that amazing sculpture that is on display at Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. It shows the Blessed Virgin Mary supporting on her lap and arms the lifeless body of her dear son. Our Lord’s legs and arms and head are hanging. Each time I see a picture of the Pieta I think of this word, surrender.

As we reflect today, dear brothers and sisters, on the Lord’s Passion and Death, one of the things that we may ponder is this: what we see in the Lord’s Passion is the total and perfect surrendering of a human being to the will of God. We also see in contrast our struggle to surrender ourselves to the will of God.

Someone may object, saying, “But he was God”. To which we may reply, “Yes, that is true. However, the Lord was also a human being as we all are, sharing our human nature in all things but sin”. As a human being, the Lord also had a human will in conjunction with his divine will. We cannot say that the Lord’s divine will suppressed his human will. The Lord, a human being and in total freedom, made use of his human will and perfectly did his Father’s will.

As we marvel this solemn day on the perfect harmony between the two wills of the Lord, it is also appropriate to reflect on the gift of the free will that God almighty has given us humans. Our first parents, Adam and Eve, were created with a free will able to perfectly obey God’s commandments. Then, original sin came about. Deceived by the devil, our first parents started to believe that they had the absolute ability to choose good or evil. They doubted that what they had been doing up to that point in their lives, that is, saying always “yes” to the will of God, was not the best way to use their freedom.

The first disobedience to the will of God brought about the disharmony in our spiritual life, of which death is the final consequence. To solve this problem, the Son of God out of love came into this world, a real human being with free will. The perfect exercise of the Lord’s human will deleted the effects of the misguided exercise of our first parents’ free will.

Today, all of us who continue struggling with our imperfect use of our free will, receive good news from the Lord crucified that affords us hope. The Lord assures us that there is hope for victory. Things changed for humanity after the Death of the Lord on the Cross. This good news is also a big challenge for us: we no longer have an excuse to remain in our addictions, and vices and sins.

The Son of God, a human being like you and me in all things but sin, with his example of perfectly obeying the will of his heavenly Father, guarantees us that with his grace we may also be able to do God’s will. The Lord not only gives us the example of complete surrendering to the direction of God, but he also offers us his grace to be able to always surrender to the will of God. Let us humbly ask the Lord crucified to grant us this grace today as we bend our knees in front of the cross in adoration.