Monday: Love Bears and Shares
WEEK 2
MONDAY
LOVE BEARS AND SHARES
Romans 5:6-11
We come now to the third pillar upon which the Christian faith rests: the Word become vicarious—“he presented himself alive after his passion” (Acts 1:3 RSV). Note the word “passion”—it points to a cross. The cross is the place where God deals with this awful fact of sin. The cross is the price that God pays to get to us in spite of our sin. God being what God is and humanity being what it is, the cross became inevitable.
For wherever pure love meets sin in the loved one, at the junction of that love and that sin a cross of pain is set up. It is the nature of love to insinuate itself into the sorrows and sins of the loved one and make them its own. All love has the doom of bleeding upon it as long as there is sin in the loved one—inevitably so. If God is love, then when that love comes into contact with sin in the loved ones, a cross of pain will be set up at the junction of that love and that sin. But how would I know there is a cross upon the heart of God—God is a Spirit, and I am bounded by my flesh—how could I know there is the unseen cross on the heart of God? How would I know except God shows me—shows me by lifting up a cross in human history so that I can see through the outer cross the inner cross upon the heart of God? That has happened.
The cross lights up the nature of God as vicarious, suffering Love.
The outstretched arms of the cross are the arms of God stretched out to gather to God’s heart all the sin and sorrow of the world to make it God’s own.
A lifer, now transformed, wrote me from prison these lines:
“I love you big—this much,” a child will say,
And thrust his arms out wide;
So baby Christ grew to love that way,
With outstretched arms he died—
“I love you—big—this much.”
The cross is God saying just that: “I love you enough to bear your sins in my own body and make them my own.” The cross is Love caring and sharing and bearing.
O Lord, through the cross I see you—the real you—and what I see sends me to my knees. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: If God’s attitude toward me is suffering Love, my attitude toward others will be suffering love.