To be broken
but not defeated
faith in more
than just this moment
hidden treasure
life eternal
embodied spirit
worldly struggle
son of God
enlightened darkness
free us from
this fleshly bondage
upon the cross
his life was given
for love of other
Father please forgive them
through his death
and resurrection
we learn that love
is the way to heaven
Holy Spirit
we are not forsake
love is always given
never taken
~Robert Van Valkenburgh
Reflection:
Jesus died on the cross, not merely as a sacrifice to the Father for our sins, but to show us what it means to love, what it means to live in and as the image of God. By giving his life for us — and this is the point, that Jesus’s life was not taken, but given: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46, NRSVCE) —Jesus demonstrates what love truly is. Love is a gift, a self-forgetting, self-safrificing, self-emptying gift, given away freely for the sake of the other.
If “God is love” (1 John 4:7-21), and if we are, as Ilia Delio states in The Not-Yet God, “in our root reality, fractals of the mystery [of God]… repeated patterns of divine wholeness radiating different frequencies of divine light (p. 108),” then we are, in our truest nature and our ultimate form, beings of love, fractals of divinity, born to give our lives in self-forgetting, self-sacrificing, and self-emptying love for the good of the other. Contrary to Thomas Aquinas’s declaration that “To love is to will the good of the other (Summa Theologiae I–II, q. 26, a. 4),” Jesus teaches us that to love is to give our lives for the good of the other, in the same way that God, in whose image and likeness we are formed, gave and gives his life to and for us.
Question for Meditation:
How does Jesus’s self-giving love on the cross shape the way I love others today?
Related Bible Verse:
“Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” — John 15:13 (ESV)
For Further Reading:
Here is a post that connects with the theme of love, faith, and transformation: Lectio Divina: Capable Of Spirit — a reflective meditation on trusting God’s hidden work within us and walking by faith rather than by sight.
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