If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. 1 Corinthian 13:1-8
For the last three years around Easter, I have blogged about the profound passion of Christ. Drawn to the cataclysmic complexity of a compelling message behind the Son of Man's mission that weaves to complete God's tapestry of grace with such grief and gravity, it is a time of the year that calls for contemplation to consider our own existence in the speck of human history and divine intervention.
Yet, I have not ruminated on the message of love that Easter resonates, as reflected in the new command that Christ left us. Just before passover, "Jesus knew that the hour had come for him to leave his world...Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end" (John 13:1). He poignantly reminded his disciples of what it means to love, during his final hours leading up to the pivotal point of his mission that would be marked by pain and suffering coupled with humiliation and utter abandonement on earth as it was in heaven during his dying moment alone on the cross. In John's gospel, Jesus said to his disciples "my children, I will be with you only a little longer. You will look for me, and just as I told the Jews, so I tell you now: Where I am going, you cannot come" yet, "a new command I give you: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples" (John 13:34).
We may often forget that in the tragedy and cruelty of the crucification, it is the humility and humanity of Christ that we saw on the cross. When his own people tore him apart both bodily and in spirit, and some casted lots to divide his clothing, Jesus still spoke from the cross with compassion to plead that "Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing" (Luke 23:34). As Michael Jensen has put it, ultimately, "motivated by love, Jesus accepts the mission of attoning for our sins, accepting in his own body the consequences of sin and evil, the whole volumne of our rage against God for daring to be God". His humble bearing of our sins on the cross is also the humility of God that we see. So as Jesus asked his disciples to take up the cross and follow him, Jesus calls us to follow behind him in a life of sacrificial love for the sake of others.
To be his disciple, one cannot avoid the cross or fail to accept what Jesus offered us there. Rather, we are called to seek in our heart the strength and steadfast faith to live a life that stands as a visible imprint of his sacrifice. So in following after Jesus, we do so by forgetting oursleves as the centrepiece in our own lives as well as perhaps even those of others in our lives and by truly giving oneself to deeds of sacrifical love. What sounds harsh to our modern day ears and seems heretic to the utilitarian rationality of our thinking in this day and age, is actually a divine way to live. It is a hard way to live. Yet, the contradictions of the cross which, like many parables of Jesus' ministry, through paradoxes show "what looks like weakness turns out to be the power of God. What looks like foolishness turns out to be wisdom. What looks like loss is actually gain."
Just as the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone through the cross and resurrection of Christ (Psalm 118:22), the cornerstone of the Christian message is also one of love as is the meaning of Easter. God has loved and longed for us since time immemorial when after genesis of the once perfect world, He created man in His image and woman for man as it is not good for man to be alone (Genesis 2:18). Then, throughout the old testament and despite death, sickness and suffering in a world that is not meant to be as it once was, the Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God (Psalm 14:2). "...the Lord longs to be gracious to you; therefore he will rise up to show mercy to you, for the Lord is a God of justice and blessed are all those who wait for him" (Isaiah 30:18).
So as Christ has risen and is resurrected, God has reached out to us through His only son and revealed the abounding love, grace and mercy that He has for us.
And this is the love we ought to long for and try to live out in our humble lives.
With tribute to Good Friday Service at St Mark's DP, 27:22 - 41:45 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cfEH-mai4E&t=1395s and Christ, the Conspiracy Theory at St Mark's DP, 22:47 - 39:05 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q82lzwAmPtM&t=2353s
