Meister Eckhart, the 13th century mystic, penned these words: “No human being has ever desired anything as much as God desires to be with him or her.” This, for me, is the essence of Holy Week. It is the culmination of Jesus’ life and ministry in which he expressed in word and action the basic truth: God desires and loves each one of us and invites us into relationship with himself. Of course, not all of Jesus’ contemporaries could accept that and ultimately that led to his death. They couldn’t believe that God could love all people -- “them”. Yes, God loves us – the good, the upright, the pious, the chosen. But Jesus showed that God does love “them” – the pagan, the sinner, the religious and the irreligious, the near and the far – all are the object of God’s desire and love.
Another 13th century medieval mystic, Mechtild of Magdeburg, highlights the value each and every person has to God when she wrote: “God has enough of all things. Contact with the soul is the one thing he never has enough of. [God] says: “That I love you exceedingly is part of my nature, because I am love itself. That I love you often comes from my longing, because I long to be heartily loved. That I love you for so long comes from my eternity, because I am without beginning and end.” Since God is love, a love that by its very nature wants to give itself, God gives himself to me. The witness of the Bible is that God loved me into existence and continues to love me at every moment of every day and desires to share his life with me. .
This brings us back to Lent and this final week leading up to the glorious celebration of Easter. As we look back on our Lenten journey, we may see quite a few ups and downs, full stops and loops and side trips. Some of the time was spent in the darkness while we acknowledged and wrestled with our sin and failure to always keep faith with God’s love for us and, let’s admit it, those times when we let Jesus down. Other times, there was light and rest as we experienced breakthroughs in our spiritual insight and could see ourselves growing a bit more Christlike. Sometimes we liked ourselves and other times we despised what we saw. But through it all and now in the final stretch, we never lost God’s love for us, even if we lost sight of it, didn’t remember it or feel it or care for it. Brennan Manning, reflecting G.K. Chesterton, calls it the “furious longing of God.” He says that “the furious longing of God is beyond our wildest desires, our hope or hopelessness, our rectitude or wickedness, neither cornered by sweet talk nor gentle persuasion. The furious longing of God, as Dan Berrigan writes, is ‘not to be reduced to a thing, a grand ideal; it is not to be reduced to a plaything, a caged songbird, for the amusement of children.’ It cannot be tamed, boxed, captivated, housebroken, or templebroken. It is simply and startlingly Jesus, the effulgence of the Father’s love.” (The Furious Longing of God, p. 24)
Jesus goes to the cross because he is love incarnate. He goes not only to bear witness to God’s love and transforming desire for our lives, but also because it is through reflection on the depth of his love for us, his willingness, as the Apostle Paul says, to become sin that we might become the righteousness of God in him (2 Corinthians 5: 21) that we come to see ourselves in a new light. A teacher was talking about modern discoveries in history class: “Can anyone name something important that didn’t exist fifty years ago” she asked. A youngster in the first row shot up his hand and exclaimed: “Me!” You and I are unique and important to God and that is clear when we look at Jesus’ life, listen to his teachings, reflect on his last week and the Cross.
But what is our reaction? God longs for us to accept his love, commit ourselves to his love, and to live as people who are loved. But committing ourselves to God’s love is an enormous challenge. For some of us it is hard to get beyond the negative voices in our heads that have repeatedly told us how imperfect we are, how much we don’t measure up, how mediocre we are. For others, the conditional love we have experienced from parents, “friends”, even the church, makes it hard for us to accept and live in the unconditional love of God. But the good news of the Gospel is that in Christ God accepts us as we are, not as we should be. But as has so often been said, God loves us too much to allow us to remain as we are. We are to become like Christ. And the good news is that God provides the possibility of becoming who we can be. God doesn’t compel us or cajole us; he attracts and encourages us and provides the resources to grow in that love and the life we are intended to live. And at the heart of those resources God provides is the power of the Resurrection (Ephesians 1:19; Colossians 1:29) and the power of God’s love (Romans 8:31-39) to transform our desires, attitudes, perspective so that they become more Christlike.
Year after year as we gather to tell the Easter story, I wonder if we really hear it. There are lilies and stirring music, lots of pageantry and color, but does the simple and yet profound story about how life conquers death, that love triumph over hate, that reconciliation replaces alienation really seep deep into our hearts and lives? Ignatius of Loyola once wrote: “There are very few people who realize what God would make of them if they abandoned themselves into his hands, and let themselves be formed by his grace.”
My prayer for myself this Easter is that I will abandon myself into the hands of the God who loves me with a “furious love” and will allow him to remake me into the image of Christ. Blessings
