Love Was (still) His Meaning
…not mild, not temperate,
God’s love for the world. Vast
flood of mercy
flung on resistance.
“I hate Lent,” one of my friends declared the week of Ash Wednesday. “My life is full of agony and suffering, and God wants me to do more of that?”
Just this week, another friend of mine cheekily signed his email with, “I’m giving up Lent for Lent.”
Both of these statements sounded reasonable to me, and here is why:
To enter into Jesus’ suffering more fully—which, if I am not mistaken, is our modern understanding of the purpose of Lent—requires us to enter the flooding river of God’s love more deeply, which is something many of us well-meaning penitents neglect to do this time of year. During Lent, I find it easier to try to impress God with proving just how humble and sacrificial I can be instead of engaging the love that led to Calvary.
Perhaps re-orienting ourselves to live in God’s “vast flood of mercy,” as Denise Levertov so poignantly wrote, is the best way to honor the Lenten season and anticipate Holy Week. I am not suggesting that we forget our mortality or forsake the awareness of our sins and need for repentance, but I am suggesting that if we do this without the presence of Divine Love, “We gain nothing.”
To echo 14th century anchoress Julian of Norwich when contemplating the cross, “Love was His meaning.” If Love truly was His meaning, then perhaps we ought to take our belovedness a bit more seriously—to really plumb the depths and seek out the heights of it—if only to find out how fathomless this Love really is.
It strikes me that the 40-day period of Lent—which models Jesus’ 40 days of fasting in the desert wilderness to prepare Him for ministry—has its origins in Jesus’ belovedness, affirmed by the Father at his baptism in the Jordan River. Hearing He was loved seems to have been the buoying up that Jesus needed, both in the waters of the Jordan and as he entered the vast and howling wilderness. If Jesus needed to be reminded that He was loved, how much more so do we? As paradoxical as it sounds, to enter more deeply into the vast river of God’s love—to get soaked to the bone with it, gulp it in, and then come back up for more—is perhaps the best way to honor the staggering gift of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.
To become keenly aware of the mercy and love of God for each one of us as displayed in the Christ of the Jordan is foundational to understanding and adoring the Christ of Calvary.
Only if, like Jesus, we have first been baptized and purified by the waters of love are we ready to engage our particular wilderness of temptation in which the world, the flesh, and the devil run rampant. Maybe the Christ who loved us more than His own life is the voice calling to us even now in our Lenten wildernesses, beckoning us toward the deep waters in which he is standing, ready to baptize us into a purer, fuller understanding of his love. Although Holy Week begins next Monday, it is not too late to heed the voice of Love as our guide and stay through the end of Lent and the ensuing drama of Christ’s death and resurrection.
Love was His meaning.
This year, my experience of Lent has been simultaneously more simple and more complex. More simple because, by God’s grace, I feel less encumbered by Lent and more invited into a Reality that is better than the one I have prescribed for myself. More complex because I chose to relinquish one thing for Lent and have stuck with it, but I have begun to wonder if God is actually inviting me to surrender something altogether different—something like chronic shame.
Maybe this year God is more interested in healing my understanding of His love than in appreciating my Lenten self-denial.
Does this sound too good to be true? Like taking the easy way out of Lent? We can take comfort in the fact that Peter, Jesus’ friend and disciple, found this a difficult reality to receive as well. On the night he was betrayed unto death, Jesus took up a towel and basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet:
He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?”
Jesus replied, “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.”
“No,” said Peter, “you shall never wash my feet.”
Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.”
“Then, Lord,” Simon Peter replied, “not just my feet but my hands and my head as well!” (John 13:6-9)
This text shows me that baptism into the love of Jesus is what prepares us to walk in the way of Jesus, all the way to Calvary and into the resurrection life that follows.
I experienced a taste of this healing love on the evening of Ash Wednesday, when my husband and I sat on our couch to read an Ash Wednesday liturgy and took turns anointing each other’s foreheads with the sign of the cross. The traditional priestly impartation when being crossed with ash upon the forehead is “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
But when my turn came to somberly anoint Drew, I found something altogether different coming from my mouth, surprising and unplanned:
“Remember you are loved, and to Love you will return.”
“Why did you say that?” Drew asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, puzzled. “It’s the first thing that popped into my mind.”
Maybe Love was calling me into Lent long before I even realized it.
As we engage our final days in the wilderness of Lent and journey with Christ towards the cross, may we remember:
Love was His meaning.
We are loved, and to Love we will return.
May we rejoice and marvel anew at a Love that died so we might live.
And may we live—really live—in this vast flood of mercy as the resurrected, beloved people of God.
Amen.
Going Deeper:
These reflections were prompted by reading an article by Julia Daniel, which is simply excellent.
“…the joy of knowing reality itself is held in being by a God completely in love with us, so much so that he refuses to let us die. That this God, in fact, loves every last atom of us into the pulsing constellation of dust that we are…”
Listen to “Born from Love” by John Mark & Sarah McMillan
I was born from love and into love I'll go
When I leave the stream behind the river I will know…