The Cross of Christ!

The cross involves hardship, anguish, grief, pain and finally death. But those who are set in this movement willingly undertake to bear this because it is essential to this movement that it should finally … be crossed through in this way … It is quite in order that man … should try to ward off pain and death. Even the Christian does this. In themselves and as such, pain, suffering and death are a questioning, a destruction and finally a negation of human life. The Christian especially cannot try to transform and glorify them. He cannot find any pleasure in them. He cannot desire or seek them … He cannot be a lover of death as the natural man may easily become in a strange reversal and unmasking of his pretended affirmation of life and avid desire for it. - K. Barth