Bound in Love

A couple of weeks ago, Father preached on what the Mass is really about, and he explained that it is a sacrificial offering. Specifically, it is the re-presentation of Christ’s sacrificial offering on the Cross. Christ makes the sacrifice, Father stands in the person of Christ, and we participate in our role as members of Christ’s body. This is our religion. This is what binds us to God. The Mass is the pinnacle of our worship activity.

The readings for today’s Scripture speak about what binds us to God outside of our liturgical worship in the Mass. Jesus tells his apostles that we must take up our cross and follow him. He tells us that we must lose our life for his sake in order to find our true life. St. Paul tells the Romans that because we have died with Christ in baptism, we can be confident that we shall live in newness of life with him.

These instructions remind us that outside of Mass we are called to live our lives as though we have already passed from this worldly life into the life of Christ. The life of Christ is the life of love. But the love that is the life of Christ is a godly love, it is a sacrificial love. St. Thomas Aquinas describes this love as, “willing the good of the other.” This love is modeled for us most profoundly by Jesus on the Cross.

I can’t say that I find this kind of love naturally attractive. I am not drawn to sacrifice and the kind of love that is marked by sacrifice. I guess it’s one of my most profound defects. For me, and perhaps for you too, I am attracted by the goodness of love shown to me. I sort of struggle initiating love, but I can respond to love with love. And the Psalm today reminds us of the goodness of the Lord. It reminds us of his love for us.

When we spend time contemplating the goodness of the Lord, then we might find that we have the capacity for that sacrificial, godly, love. The Psalm that sings of the goodness of the Lord is sung by a person who knows how much God loves him, and he realizes that he is loving God back in return. Outside of Mass, what will bind us to our heavenly father is receiving and then reciprocating his love.

We have a Christian duty to attend Mass. We also have this  invitation from Christ to dwell on God’s love for me and for you. And dwelling on a thing is not the same as simply saying it.

I can say that God loves me personally. I can say that he desires an intimate and vulnerable relationship with me personally. I can say that he understands, even more profoundly than me, my character defects and my weaknesses. But it is hard for me to love intellectually. Love starts most of the time with an emotional response. And God gives us many signs of his love to which we can respond emotionally. Once the passion of love is flowing, the intellect and will can then direct it in a holy way.

Among other signs, God speaks to us through his creation. For many of us, the best way for us to feel God’s loving presence is through nature. A beautiful sky, or a beautiful hike through the woods, or the beauty of the animals that he created, can be the way that we see God. For others, the best way for us to feel God’s loving presence is through humanity. The loving caress of a mother, the warm approval of a father, the warm fraternal exchange of true friends, can be the way that we see God.

God gives us Christians two powerful tools for binding ourselves to God outside of Mass. These are the Holy Scriptures and prayerful reflection. We are given at Mass a wealth of Scripture that is read to us. But for most of us, five minutes after Mass, we don’t remember what the epistle was. We may not even remember which book the Gospel came from. So hearing the Scripture read to us at Mass is really not enough. We need to read our Bible. And we need to read it the right way.

The Bible is our family history. The Israelites were called out as a nation consecrated by God. The Church is those called out to be a holy nation consecrated by God. So the Old Testament and the New Testament are of one piece. The same lessons that we find in the New Testament we can see in the Old Testament. So feel free to read the Old Testament as well as the New Testament.

The Psalter, the book of the Psalms, is the hymn book and prayer book of the Israelites and the Church. Everyone today who prays the Liturgy of the Hours is cycling through the Psalter over the course of a month or a week depending on which version he’s using. There is great benefit in the repetition of reading the Scriptures again and again.

God does not want us all to be Bible scholars arguing about form criticism and historical accuracy. He wants us to be his loving children and his disciples. So read the Scripture as a family history. Don’t worry about the difficulty of those Hebrew names. Just skip over those names that are hard to pronounce. The message comes through despite the names.

The other way to read the Scriptures is to pick a story or even half a story in the Bible and read it reflectively. It is a kind of reading that leads to prayer. Read the story, and then ruminate on it. If you’ve ever watched a cow chewing its cud, it just chews and chews and chews seemingly forever. Let that be a model for chewing on the snippet of Scripture that you just read. You can be like St. Ignatius and put yourself into the scene if you like. You can be struck by the oddness of what you just read and let that be your focus. You may not get an intellectually satisfying answer to your question, but you will develop a real relationship with God, the author of Scripture. You will find yourself bound to Him even if you don’t understand Him.

Prayerful focus on the stories and scenes given to us through the Scriptures will lead us inevitably to the conclusion that God loves us. He loves us so much that he put up with all the foolishness and inconsistency and disobedience of the Israelites. They turned away from him time and time again, and he remained committed to them. He did not judge them according to their deeds, but he forgave them according to his mercy. He loved them so much that he sent his only son. St. John tells us he sent his son not to condemn the world but that the world might be saved through him. The sacrifice of the Cross is the highest example of God’s love for us.

When I deeply consider how much God loves me, how much he loves me personally, how much he loves me despite my weakness, I find I love him back. I don’t love him as much as he loves me, but I want to love him. I can honestly sing of the goodness of the Lord. Wanting to love him makes it a lot easier to do what he asks of his disciples. Wanting to love Jesus gives me the strength to go pick up my cross and follow him. Being bound to my heavenly father and his glorious son through prayer and the Scriptures gives me the strength to be bound to him in discipleship. May we all be willing to pick up our cross and follow him because we love him.