I have a good friend who is an oncologist, a cancer specialist. "In my work," he says, "I see two kinds of people, those who are embittered and destroyed by illness and those who are ennobled by it." Some people, he explains, become angry when they learn they are going to die. They lash out at God and everybody around them. Everything centers on them and what is happening to them. Others are the opposite. They get in touch with the ground of their beliefs, with some deep faith inside themselves, and become peaceful centers of radiant hope and goodness. They become more loving and considerate of others. In fact, they become saints.

A few summers ago I preached a sermon at Massanetta Springs entitled "The God at the end of Your Rope," in which I talked about the way we often make our greatest discoveries of the presence of God when we have been visited by calamity and are at the end of our own resources. Afterward, a man came up to share with me how this had been true in his own life. His wife had left him, and shortly after the divorce he had gone to a conference. He was standing in a hallway talking with a woman whose husband had deserted her. The woman's handicapped child was also there. While they discussed their experiences, a grossly overweight woman walked by and overheard them. She stopped to tell them that her husband had deserted her too. As the three of them stood there discussing their brokenness, the men suggested that they put their arms around each other and have prayer together.

"It was like a miracle," he said. "God's Spirit came upon us and, for the first time for each of us, we all began to feel healing occurring within us."

All that brokenness, and then the healing when they prayed and submitted themselves to God.

Jesus kept His faith in God's sovereignty, He prayed and yielded Himself to God, and He went on with His life with courage.

Courage is part of it too, isn't it? Courage. We don't make enough of courage today. The word comes from the Latin cor, for "heart" or "spirit." "You gotta have heart!" It isn't the property of the Rambos of the world; it's the quality of a lot of little people, a lot of quiet people who know how to suffer and keep going. People who are barely making it as teachers or nurses or social workers. People who are taking care of sick parents or retarded children. People who are living with alcoholics or drug addicts. People whose dreams fell around their feet a long time ago, but they just keep slogging along, like good foot-soldiers in the army of the Lord.

Jesus knew what was coming for Him. He knew that the fair day on Palm Sunday would give way to the stormy night before the cross. He knew His friends would desert Him. He knew He would be hung out like the pelt of an animal exposed to all the world and alone with His pain.

Yet He kept going. He didn't miss a step. He met the people all that week. He stood up to the Pharisees. He refused to back down from the truth God had given Him to utter. And, in the end, He walked to Calvary with courage and died with a dignity the world had rarely seen. It made the Roman soldier in charge of the crucifixion pull on his beard and say, "Truly, this man was the Son of God!"