Willingness to die for love

IF our love is true, we should be willing to die for love of God and for everybody else. This is what Christ showed us and also commanded us. He said that we should love one another as he loved and continues to love us. And we know that his love for us culminated in his offering of his life on the cross to assume all our sins and conquer them with his death and resurrection. 

 In other words, a love that is not willing to die for the beloved is certainly not true love. The willingness to die for the beloved is the clear proof that our love is true or that our love is the same love Christ has for us. When we affirm that we love God or that we love someone, we should see to it that we mean that love to include the willingness to die for God or for someone. 

 This truth of faith about love is somehow proclaimed in that gospel episode where Christ asked Peter three times if he, Peter, loved Christ. (cfr. Jn 21,15-19) When Peter consistently answered in the affirmative, Christ proceeded by describing in so many words how Peter would die for the love for Christ and for the Church which is all of us. 

 We need to understand then that it is this love-driven death that will lead us to eternal life. We cannot reach heaven if we are not willing to die for our beloved, like what Christ did. Our willingness to die out of love should replicate the willingness to die of Christ who is the very embodiment of true love. 

 The secret, therefore, of having our death as a way to our resurrection and eternal life is to die with Christ. Only with him can our death and resurrection become our victory over sin and death. St. Paul encapsulated this most wonderful truth of our faith when he said, “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his.” (Rom 6,5) 

 No wonder then that Christ culminated his redemptive work with his passion and death on the cross. Only then would his own resurrection take place. Christ made this point clear when after being rightly identified by Peter as ‘the Christ of God,’ he proceeded to talk about his passion, death and resurrection. 

 “The Son of Man must suffer greatly,” he said, “and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised.” (Lk 9,22) 

 We have to deepen our belief that with Christ’s resurrection, sin and death have been definitively conquered, and a new life in God is given to us. We are now a new creation, with the power of Christ to conquer sin and death and everything else that stands in the way of our becoming true children of God. 

 And so, we have every reason to think that we can live forever in Christ over whom death no longer has dominion. In spite of whatever, we have every reason to be happy and confident, as long as we are faithful to Christ. 

 We just need to realize more deeply that Christ is alive and wants to live his life with us, because we are patterned after him. Let us not miss this most golden opportunity.

Our God-based unity

HOW should we understand our need for unity? Perhaps we can get some ideas from the priestly prayer of Christ before he entered into his passion and death. In it, he addressed the Father: 

 “I have given them the glory you gave me, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be brought to perfection as one, that the world may know that you sent me, and that you loved them even as you loved me.” (Jn 17,22-23) 

 Tremendous words, indeed! They clearly tell us that our need for unity among ourselves should channel the unity between the Father and the Son which can only be achieved through the Holy Spirit. In other words, our unity should reflect the Trinitarian unity in God. 

 It is a unity that is based on the love that is the very essence of God as shown to us and commanded of us by Christ. (cfr. Jn 15,12) That love-caused unity definitely is not uniformity. It is a unity that has a universal scope and that can contend with all the conditions of men, whether good or bad. 

 This love-caused unity knows how to blend well the exclusivity of truth with the inclusivity of charity. It knows how to understand everyone, irrespective of how they are. It searches and struggles to find ways of how to help everyone in the way everyone needs to be helped. It knows how to bear each other’s burdens. (cfr. Gal 6,2) 

 Definitely, this kind of unity is the fruit of God’s grace, of our effort to identify ourselves with Christ and to assume the very spirit of God which is actually freely and abundantly given to us. It is just for us to correspond properly to all these goodness and gifts of God to us. 

 Are we up to it? Are we willing to understand and love everyone, including those who may be considered as our enemies, since Christ himself told us to love our enemies? (cfr. Mt 5,43-44) Are we willing to adapt ourselves to how everyone is, so we may echo those words of St. Paul: “To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.” (1 Cor 9,22) 

 More importantly, are we willing to have the same desire of Christ to offer his life for the salvation of mankind, willing to bear the sins of men and to offer forgiveness even they have not yet asked for it? 

 It is this kind of unity that in spite of our unavoidable differences and conflicts due to all sorts of reasons that we can truly say we have the spirit of God, and therefore, our unity is based on God who is love and not just our own ideas of love and unity. 

 Definitely, this kind of unity will involve human suffering. But again, if that unity is based on God’s love as shown by Christ, it would be a suffering that we would welcome and love. As one saint would put, we have to carry the cross, but it would be a “cross without the cross.” It would somehow be a sweet and meaningful suffering. 

 If ever we have to make clarifications, suggestions, corrections, we would do it with due prudence and always with charity.

God, the world and the cross

WE have to learn to be with God as we ought while we are in the world. We know very well how we can easily get entangled and attached to the world at the expense of our need to be with God always. No doubt this is a very challenging duty. 

 This was the ardent prayer of Christ to the Father before his passion and death. “I pray not that you should take them out of the world,” he said, “but that you should keep them from evil. They are not of the world, as I also am not of the world. Sanctify them in truth. Your word is truth.” (Jn 17,15-17) 

 We have to understand that while the world is also a creation of God and is therefore good, we should not be naïve to think that the world is our ultimate end and that everything in it is just fine. The world has been created by God and given to us so we can be tested to see if what God wants us to be, i.e., to be his image and likeness, is also what we want to be. The world is a testing ground for us. 

 To be sure, the world has been created by God with its nature and laws that not only can lead us to God but also to enable us through it to give glory to God. We just have to discover the true God-given nature and laws of the world so that we can we can live in it properly, pursuing the true purpose of our life. 

 But given our sinfulness, we have to be wary that the world is now full of the effects of our sin, such that it can also be a formidable source of temptation to us. Thus, St. John warned us: “Everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world.” (1 Jn 2,16) 

 So, we have to be always on guard against these dangers, especially when we use our sciences, arts and technologies, our ideologies, our business and politics, etc. Especially in the social sciences, we cannot be too sure about what we say or conclude after some study or research, because in them we are dealing with some contingent realities. 

 It’s amazing that in the area of politics, for example, many people consider their suspicions as facts already, and the hearsays, ideologies, fads, biases as some kind of infallible doctrine or even absolute dogmas. 

 To be with God in these contingent aspects of our life, we need to be like Christ who while preaching the truth—and as St. Paul would put it, preaching it in season and out of season—ultimately was willing to offer his life for all of us for the sake of our salvation. In other words, what we have to preach, again as St. Paul would put it, should be Christ crucified, and not just some earthly doctrine. (cfr. 1 Cor 1,23) 

 Unless the cross is involved in our studies, in our temporal affairs, in our sciences, arts and technologies, and especially in the social sciences like economics and politics, we would actually be out on a limb, prone to such dangers as imprudence, lack of charity, triumphalism, etc. 

 We need to see to it that for us to live in the world properly, we need the cross of Christ always!