Cross makes our love real

WE are commanded to love. That’s the long and short of it. That’s because we have been created, first and last, out of love and for love. Thus, we can’t help but love, even if our loving is of the wrong kind.

As image and likeness of God, and elevated to be children of his, meant to participate in his very own life and to reflect it in ours, we can’t help but live our whole life in love, since God himself, as St. John said, is love. “Deus caritas est.”

That’s the ideal. The realistic view, however, is one where the pursuit of love is accompanied every step of the way by pain, sacrifice, self-denial and self-giving, etc. Let me explain.

First, we have to get a really good view of this whole business of our creation. I used to wonder, and I know a millions of others still do, why God created us if we only end up having to suffer.

That question stewed in my mind for a good number of years, preventing me from getting hot about faith and religion. Heck, did God commit a mistake in the beginning and then correct that mistake by making us suffer?

That thought, of course, spontaneously came out because of an error in the understanding of creation. The error is simply this—that creation is just a one-act deal that started and ended with Adam and Eve, and that from then on, we are simply on our own.

But that’s not the case. Creation is not only putting something into existence, but rather also keeping that creature in existence, because in creation the whole existence of the creature, not just its beginning, is involved. As long as something exists, its creation continues to take place.

Creation is not like our act of manufacturing things. The former involves making something out of nothing, putting it into existence and keeping it in existence. The latter is making something new from something else. Here the product has an independent existence from the producer.

Therefore, all the stages of our existence is part of our creation, and as such has been in the mind of God from all eternity. We just have to try to understand this mystery as best as we can. Thus, faith is always needed here, not just our reason.

In God, we are told, one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years is like one day. That’s an allusion of how eternity impacts with time. Yes, a mystery. Only the workings of faith can make us understand it somehow.

So, to put it simplistically, in our creation, there is the first stage in Adam and Eve, where everything was good. But it must already have been foreseen by God from eternity that that original goodness and justice would be lost.

And so there has to be another stage, that of the Son of God becoming man and saving us the way Christ did, to be direct about it. From there, everyone of us has to correspond to Christ in the Holy Spirit. Our creation is completed with the coming of Christ and the Holy Spirit.

In short, we have a role to play in our own creation, because in the first place we have been made in the image and likeness of God. God treats us the way he treats his own self—with freedom and love.

Paraphrasing St. Augustine, we can say that God created us without us, but he cannot save us, or re-create us, without us.

He wants that we pass from the old man stage to that of the new man in Christ. Remember St. Paul to the Ephesians: “Put off…the old man…and be renewed in the spirit of your mind. And put on the new man, who according to God is created in justice and holiness of truth.” (4,22-24)

He does not impose himself on us. But he’ll do everything so that we learn to want to have God through Christ in the Holy Spirit in our life. Christ is not an optional item in our life.

And so we just have to realize that our loving which is the essence and reason of our creation and life has to be a vital part of the love shown to us by Christ who said, “love one another as I have loved you.” This love culminates and is summarized in the cross.

Therefore, Christ´s cross makes our love real. It purifies us, strengthens us and identifies us with Christ.