What Love Looks Like

Friday of the Passion of the Lord (Good Friday)

            In a few moments we will have the opportunity to venerate the cross, a chance to come and give some sign of honor and respect—a genuflection, a bow, a kiss, a touch—to the instrument of our salvation.

            But right now, I want all of you to look at the crucifix hanging above our altar.  It’s been there since 1968 when the church was completed.  Perhaps many of us don’t even notice it any more, even with how large it is, because it has been there since the beginning.  But really take a good look at it.  What do you see?

            Of course, the easiest answer is Jesus.  We see Jesus crucified on the cross.  But go deeper.  Maybe we see a horrible way to die, cleaned up, though, for public piety.  Maybe we see the different types of wood.  Maybe we see the inscription INRI, which stands for “Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum,” “Jesus the Nazarean, King of the Jews.” 

           

An Armenian mural from the
Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre in
Jerusalem

Those things are all there.  But when we look at the crucifix we should see love.  What we celebrate today on Good Friday is love: Love that was willing to be destroyed so that we could live.  Maybe when we think of love we think of a heart, or we think of an old couple holding hands together on a bench, or we think of a a young man, down on one knee, proposing to his girlfriend.  But love is the crucifixion.

            True love is when the Lover is willing to be beat up instead of or even for the Beloved.  True love is having the skin of your back ripped out by scourging so that the Beloved can remain whole.  True love is when the Lover’s head is pierced with thorns placed in a mocking way to represent a crown so that the Beloved can wear a true crown in paradise.  True love is when the Lover walks with a heavy burden so that the Beloved does not have to carry it or travel that awful road.  True love is when the Lover is willing to die so that the Beloved can live. 

            Whom do you love?  For whom are you willing to suffer?  For whom are you willing to die?  Love always means giving all of who you are, even your very life, for the good of the other, so that the other can go to heaven.  Love means horrible suffering, taken willingly so that the other does not have to suffer.  What we celebrate today is love, a love so pure, so true, that Lover was willing to die an agonizing death at the very hands of the Beloved.  That is love.  And if we come back just a day or so more, we will see that love, though it is death, is also new life.

            God loves you.  He shows us that love means being willing to die for the one we love.  How much do we love God?