All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

"All things have been handed over to me."  What things?  If we go back to the creation of all things in Genesis we find out.  God the Father created the universe and all things in it.  He created man "and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it." (Genesis 2.15)  But the man and his wife disobeyed God "therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden...He drove out the man and placed an angel with a flaming sword to guard the way to the tree of life." (Genesis 3.23-24)

This is the broken creation and divorced man which has been handed over to Jesus.  Jesus was given all of creation and every one of us.  He came out of the garden of paradise by the Father's side, past the cherubim and the flaming sword, took on a human body and came to us in our place of exile, being tempted like us, sweating, laboring and working like us.  After teaching us the ways of God he allowed himself to be tortured and slain by us to undo the ancient wrong we had done, in obedience to his own law of atonement which he did not need to be constrained by, all so that our place in the garden might not just be restored but rather so that a far greater destiny might be ours: life on high with him.  Such is the God we have.

All things have been handed over to Jesus by the Father.  You, I, the mountains and hills, your troubles, our sins - all belong to Jesus.  Knowing this let us not make him suffer our doubts and discouragements.  Yes, we must carry our cross as he told us.  We will bleed and die like he did, either inside or out.  But we don't ever have to allow discouragement or despair over our infidelities to take possession of us.  He possesses us, he our shepherd, and it is impossible that he fail.  May our confidence in him be heroic despite what the tempter tells us, he who would have us there in the dirt next to him.