Recently I was talking with one of my sons about taking responsibility. We were talking about a basic chore—how it serves the family when he does it, and lets us down when he doesn’t.

It happened to be Passion Week, so I found myself sharing with him something about Jesus that returns to me over and over as I get older. It’s stayed with me partially because it’s a simple, earthy observation that I find constantly applicable. Anyone can relate to it. It’s clear as the cross.

It’s this: Awhile back, I realized a major reason why I respect Jesus so much—why I see him as the ultimate man, the living symbol of what all men should be. I hold him in highest regard because Jesus the Son of God took responsibility.

He took responsibility for his every thought, word, and deed. He acted righteously in every situation, no matter how much strain or duress he was under, no matter how fierce the opposition, no matter how little he had to gain or how much he had to lose in the moment.

He never backed down or backed away from the fullness of responsibility the law of God—the divine call to truth and love—presented to him.

Yet he not only took responsibility for his own life. He took responsibility for me, for you, for the cosmos itself. He took more than his fair share—infinitely more. He shouldered incalculable weight that wasn’t his to carry. He looked at the untold effects of our choices, our habits, our dark hearts that spill over with evil—we call these devastating effects “the curse”—and he took it all on.

As a man, each day of his life, this was the path he chose—again and again, in all kinds of circumstantial weather.

A decent man takes care of himself and his family—his “dependents.” A good man adds other people to his responsibilities—those he seeks to care for and influence for good—looking beyond himself and even his loved ones, asking whom else he can bless. A man we consider great may do this in unusual and widespread ways, intentionally helping others through what he produces or what he provides or how he protects, with outsized effects on those in his wide orbit.

But the responsibility taken on by Jesus of Nazareth as he walked our world was immeasurable, carrying out the world-changing mission given him by his Father.

We marvel at Mary, and what it took to bear and raise the Messiah. We wonder at Moses, who endured decades of leading a recalcitrant people through the wilderness. We witness Paul, emissary to the Gentiles, trekking and suffering around the Mediterranean seaboard for the cause of Christ. Each of them, like so may others in Scripture, bore burdens not their own.

Yet we find no other like the final son of David, God’s own Son, and what he carried. He did the whole will of his Father, fulfilling the expectations that Adam, Israel, and the world failed to meet. Moment by moment, day by day, year by year, tempted and tried like none before or after, he stood in righteousness. He took responsibility of all kinds, in all ways, in every moment, to the very end.

Even to the cross, this man was obedient to the point of death, carrying out his Father’s plan to the full. Nothing was outsourced or offloaded; no just action was diminished or delayed; no truth was diluted or left untold; no needed battle was unengaged; and no person was left unloved, by the fullest definition of love.

And so I love this man. I admire him, and I find no other like him. I owe him my life, and as I walk the same world he walked, my highest ambition is to have his Spirit shape and form me, until I am finally like him myself. He is everything to me, and his life of truth and love is all I wish to be.