From today’s Gospel, from St John: ‘You have sorrow now, but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you’.

St Cyril of Alexandria commented: ‘As then they were thirsting for information and sought to know more exactly the meaning of His words, He gives a clearer exposition of His Passion, and vouchsafes them the foreknowledge of the sufferings that He was about to undergo to their great profit. It was not in order that He might engender in them premature alarm that He deemed it meet to give them this explanation beforehand, but in order that, forearmed by their knowledge, they might perchance be found more courageous to withstand the terror that would assail them’.

These words are as true for us today as when Our Lord first spoke them. May His courage, which led Him to the Cross, be with us today in whatever trials may threaten to overwhelm us; and may God bless you this day.