Author and speaker Brennan Manning has an amazing story about how he got the name “Brennan.” While growing up, his best friend was Ray. The two of them did everything together: bought a new car together as teenagers, double-dated together, went to school together and so forth. They even enlisted in the Army together, went to boot camp together and fought on the frontlines together. One night while sitting in a foxhole, Brennan was reminiscing about the old days in Brooklyn while Ray listened and ate a chocolate bar. Suddenly a live grenade came into the foxhole. Ray looked a Brennan, smiled, dropped his chocolate bar and threw himself on the live grenade. It exploded, killing Ray, but Brennan’s life was spared.
When Brennan became a priest he was instructed to take on the name of a saint. He thought of his friend, Ray Brennan. So he took on the name Brennan. Years later he went to visit Ray’s mother in Brooklyn. They sat up late one night having tea when Brennan asked her, “Do you think Ray loved me?” Mrs. Brennan got up off the couch, shook her finger in front of Brennan’s face and shouted, “Jesus Christ–what more could he have done for you?!” Brennan said that at that moment he experienced an epiphany. He imagined himself standing before the cross of Jesus wondering, Does God really love me? and Jesus’ mother Mary pointing to her son, saying, “Jesus Christ–what more could he have done for you?”
The cross of Jesus is God’s way of doing all he could do for us. And yet we often wonder, Does God really love me? Am I important to God? Does God care about me? And Jesus’ mother responds, “What more could he have done for you?”
Today is Ash Wednesday. It is also St. Valentine’s Day.
You may be wondering if you are loved. You are. John 15:13 says, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
Ash Wednesday is a day of repentance, a day to be reminded of our frailty, mortality, and failures. But it is also a day of love. It is a day we are marked with a cross. It is a day we are reminded of the cross of Christ, who came in weakness to give us strength, who took on mortality to give us immortality, and who took our sin and failure upon himself in order to extend to us the gifts of restoration, forgiveness, and fellowship with God.
We have been embraced by way of a costly love. What more could he have done for you?
[W]e don’t need to understand every atonement theory to know the transforming power of the Cross. Its undeniable power to transform us is a simple fact, confirmed by human experience.
A Catholic archbishop described how three mischievous teenage boys decided to play a trick on their local priest. While he was hearing confessions one day, they took turns going into the confessional and admitting to doing all sorts of fantastic things that they had made up.
A young boy volunteered to be the first one. However, the priest was not to be fooled and said to him, “I want you to make this penance for what you have done. Go to the front of the church, to the cross on which Jesus hangs, look Jesus in the face, and say three times, “All this you did for me, and I don’t give a damn.”
The teenager did it once, twice, and then, when he began repeating the sentence a third time, broke down in tears, and his words simply became, “You did this for me.” He left the church facing a new direction.
When the archbishop finished the story, he said, “The reason I know this is that I was that young man.”†
The way of Christ is the way of the Cross. In Luke 9:23, Jesus said, ““Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.”
But before we take up our cross, it is helpful to recall Jesus took up his. He carried his cross and died upon it for us.
Why?
Love.
The love of Christ displayed in the Cross has the power to turn us around, to transform us, to renew us, to embolden us, and to empower us. It is a reminder of our calling to die daily, to share in the sufferings of Christ (1 Corinthians 15:31, 1 Peter 4:12-19).
What moves us to respond to this call? “You did this for me,” as Jean-Marie Lustiger discovered. Or as Paul wrote, “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).
How do we keep this before us? By actively bringing the story of the Cross to our minds, by thinking carefully and at length about God’s action at Calvary. We return to the Gospels. We read the accounts.
Hudson recommends being reminded by way of symbol. We can place a small cross at our desk, on the dresser, in a pocket, some place where we will see, touch, and encounter it, thus being reminded of the Cross.
The reminder is twofold. First, Christ loves you with a costly love. And second, Christ calls you to cross-carrying discipleship. Ephesians 5:1-2 says: “Follow God’s example, therefore, as dearly loved children and walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”
Walk in the way of love. It is the way of the Cross.
_______________________ † Hudson’s citation: “The boy’s name was Jean-Marie Lustiger. He was admitted to the Catholic church the following Easter. And he became the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris. True story. He died on August 5th, 2007”; “You Did That for me?” Father Paul’s Homily Blog, March 28, 2010, http://frpaulhomilies.blogspot.com/2010/03/you-did-that-for-me.html.
You want me to tell you why and how God is to be loved?
I answer that the reason for loving God is God Himself. As to how He is to be loved, there is only one measure: It is immeasurable!
Is this a sufficient answer? Perhaps, but only so to a wise man. Now, I am indebted (Romans 1:14) to deal with the unwise as well, perhaps I need to answer for them also. So while a word is enough for the wise, I need to elaborate the answer for the simple folk as well. Therefore, I do not find irksome to treat the subject more fully, if not more deeply so.
There are two reasons, I insist, why we should love God for His own sake. Righteously so, God is love for His own sake. Profitably so, God is to be loved with the highest benefit. So when we ask again, ‘Why is God to be loved?’ there are two possible meanings to this question. But the answer is the same, for God is the sufficient cause of love, because of who God is.
Bernard of Clairvaux lived from 1090 to 1153. He was an abbot and an early figure in the founding and growth of the Cistercian movement. Bernard founded seventy monasteries, of which those monasteries founded one hundred more. That totals one hundred seventy communities of faith that trace themselves to Bernard, and to God’s work in Bernard. He was a reformer, a preacher, and a Christian mystic. On Loving God is among his most well known works.
These words I’ve quoted are from the opening pages of that book, in which Bernard raises the key question of the treatise and, more expansively, one of the greatest questions of all. “If God is the ground of all reality, how then should we live?”
That depends greatly on who God is, what God is like, and how human beings stand in relationship to that God.
Bernard assumes his readers believe in the existence of the God of Christianity. Bernard then asserts both how and why we should love God. His answer is simple: with everything, because God has given us everything, all because of love.
His answer is a Christian answer.
God is love, as we read in 1 John 4:8 and 1 John 4:16. Those brief summations capture and reflect a truth that runs through the Bible. God, as Creator, brought the creation forth as an expression of that very love which God is. Love, by its very nature, is relational. It is not only expressed in the abstract, but the concrete, and it is something shared between persons.
The love existing within the Trinity, God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, spirals out into the creation. And, as Genesis 1 tells us, when God creates humankind in the divine image, it is so that human beings might relate to God, and to one another, in love. As God is fruitful, human beings are commanded to be fruitful and to flourish as part of the divine dance.
God is to be loved, says Bernard, simply because God is love, and thus lovely. Being infinite, there is no measure to which God can be fully and rightly loved. This does not stop us from responding in love. Love begets love, and increases love. And because God has provided us with everything–with existence, the created order, community, gifts, redemption, an invitation to a holy life, the grace by which to be sanctified, and an eternal hope–we owe everything in return.
Bernard divides the wise and the simple, not to be condescending (even though Bernard was known to be rigid and austere), but to name what should be plain to all.
The wise person will intuit Bernard’s meaning, for any contemplation of the Bible, of truth, and especially of Christ, will lead a person to begin to see that God, in God’s very nature, is immeasurable in loveliness and praiseworthiness, and therefore no amount of gratitude or thanksgiving or service could match the magnitude of God’s glory. And once this quest is begun, it becomes an eternal adventure of discovery, an everlasting way of companionship and friendship with the Creator, a pilgrimage of new creation.
The simple person is the one who has not given God’s character or nature much thought. But if they choose to do so, they will soon become wise. Seekers, in God’s economy, find. Askers, receive. Knockers find the door opened.
And even the wise, who know that God’s loveliness is immeasurable, take joy and delight in the further contemplation of God. The discoveries are ever new, the truths of God bring delight, the beauty of God is captivating, the goodness of God inspires wonder.
Bernard says that the love of God is righteous and profitable. Not only is it right. It brings benefit. For in the contemplation of God’s love, and as we respond to God in love, we not only receive the healing of our broken souls and the binding up of our deepest wounds, we are sent forth as witnesses, emissaries, ambassadors, and servants of the love which we have received from the source of love himself, filled to overflowing.
Love. We were made for it. We were made by it. Not only for the sentiment. But also for the eternal relational delight that results when God gives love to the beloved, and the beloved returns that love in word, thought, feeling, deed—with everything.
I think people don’t change very much when all they have is a finger pointed at them. I think the only way people change is in relation to somebody who loves them.
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