Friends, in today’s Gospel, we see Jesus as the judge who shows mercy and love. The New Testament sense is that the suffering of the world is produced by the breaking of the loop of grace, the insistence that one’s life should be one’s own. When this attitude dominates, when we want knowledge of good and evil for ourselves, when we want what is coming to us, we end up losing the little that we think we have.

Jesus saved us by the whole course of his obedience. His Savior’s life was an obedient response to the will of God, a displacement of his own concerns in favor of the Father’s: “Amen, amen, I say to you, a son cannot do anything on his own, but only what he sees his father doing; for what he does, his son will do also.”