Good Friday

"We begin at the real beginning, with love as a Divine energy. This primal love is Gift-love. In God, there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give...God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing – or should we say 'seeing'? there are no tenses in God – the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath’s sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a 'host' who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and 'take advantage of' Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves."

- C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, pg. 126-127


I hear it so often said by my atheistic friends that the cross was God's "Plan B," the backup to his original idea of a loving relationship with creation. This is so incredibly far from Orthodox Christianity. At the dawn of time - no, before time - God, in his Triune nature, was and is still in a perfect love relationship with the Three. Creation was an act of pouring out that love, the giving love he simply is. And as Lewis writes here, this Creator's one and only plan was to make a universe that would mirror that Triune Love: an unending giving love. Yet it could only be done so dramatically: a Son's life was the way to display this absolutely radical and unfair love. He needs nothing in return.

The purest of love is the being who doesn't just ask for nothing in return, but doesn't even think of a reciprical love. "By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters." This type of love is impossible when you are apart form God. We are not Divine. We need to feel loved, but, "this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us."

The last year or so of my prayers and meditations have been centered around a couple of things. One of which has been this question: "Does my love look like the cross?" Or, put another way, "Does my love really hurt?" So often, my relationships are easy. People laugh at my jokes, make me feel better about myself, and make me look credible and cool. This costs me nothing, I'm simply receiving love and good feeling. I have very few relationships where giving love hurts. But what are those relationships that make me hurt? That cost me something? My prayer is that God would make me a sacrificer, a giver to people. And for the forgiveness and grace for my selfishness. In these prayers, I have found God to be gracious: showing me where to give, how to give, and to always keep the gospel at the center of my prayers for those I know.