Love, love, love, love, love. It seems that we hear this word over and over. Bill loves Sue, Sue loves Fred, etc.
Every sitcom is loaded with people who fall in and out of love. We hear about
married people breaking up and we wonder where their love went. Then we come to Church, and again we
hear about love. But it is not all the same. True love is a choice that demands sacrifice. People who fall in and out of love have
not made a choice that demands sacrifice, or at least one of them has not[1].
There is always a lot of talk about love when people
are getting married. But, sadly,
some of them don’t see the Lord as the center of their love. So they want
weddings with beautiful backgrounds, but not necessarily with the sacrament of
marriage. Perhaps they are not
ready for true love. Perhaps they are not ready for a choice that demands
sacrifice. Perhaps they really do not want Christ’s love in their
marriage. That costs too much.
The Love of Christ comes with a price. There is
sacrifice that we need to make to return the Lord’s love. If we have been
chosen to work for the Kingdom, and according to today’s Gospel, we have, It was not you who chose me, but I who chose
you to go forth and bear fruit[2],
and then our options are limited.
If we have put on the baptismal gown of the Lord, we cannot wear the
clothes of pagans. This is hard to
accept in a society that preaches endless choices, a society that caters to
infantile fantasies of no rules and no limits to life. We have to come to the
realization that because we have been chosen, we have to have rules for a way
of life that is truly Christian. We have to deny our infantile desires for the
infinitely greater good of the Kingdom of God.
The choice of love demands that we accept limitations
on our lives and even pain and suffering in order to love as Jesus loved. Parents respond to their baby’s cries
in the middle of the night. They
have no choice if they really love their child. But that choice takes sacrifice. This is the meaning of true
love. Look at your Moms and Dads.
Look at the sacrifices each makes for the other. That is how they make love to each
other. In a true marriage, marital
love is infinitely more than the physical expression of that love.
Love, the true love of Jesus, imposes limits on us.
Love is sacrificial. When we look
at the cross, we realize the life that we have been chosen to lead. We have been chosen to make Jesus’ life
a reality. And He died for others.
One last story. It is just a story, not in scripture,
but it gets the point across, and it is kind of funny. It is the story of how
the devil tried to sneak into heaven. The legend goes that just before dawn on
Easter Sunday, the devil dressed up as the Risen Lord. He had his fallen angels
accompany him, all dressed as angels of light. As he approached the gates of
heaven he and his mob cried out the words of Psalm, Lift up your heads, O gates of Heaven. Rise up you ancient portals that
the King of Glory might enter[3].
The real angels looked down at whom they thought was their King returning in
triumph from the dead. So they
shouted back in joy the next words of that psalm, Who is the King of Glory? Then the devil then made a fatal
mistake. He opened his arms,
spread his palms and declared, I am the
King of Glory. He did himself in.
The angels immediately slammed shut the gates of heaven. They knew this
was not the Lord…They saw that there were no marks of the nails in his palms. He
had no wounds of love. He was obviously an imposter.
To put it very simply: if we have been chosen by
Christ, and we have, then we have to accept His way of life, the way of limits,
the way of sacrificial love ■
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