At the core of all life-changing love is self-sacrifice. Don’t believe me? If you love someone who is put together, has no major needs, it costs you nothing to love them. But if you ever love someone who has needs, someone who is in trouble, someone who has been wounded emotionally or otherwise, it is going to cost you. You can’t love them without taking a hit yourself. Some of your fullness is going to have to go to them. The only way to love them is through self-sacrifice. All life-changing love is self-sacrificing.
Remember Lilly and James Potter, the parents of Harry Potter? In the very first book of the series, the malevolent and evil Dark Lord Voldemort tries to kill the infant Harry Potter, but is himself mysteriously vanquished and disappears for years. When the disembodied Voldemort possesses another villain, he goes after Harry. When the villain tries to lay his hands on Harry, he experiences agonizing pain and so is thwarted. Harry later goes to Dumbledore, his mentor, and asks, “Why couldn’t he touch me?” Dumbledore tells Harry, “Your mother died to save you…love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign… but to have been loved so deeply…will give us some protection forever.” Dumbledore’s answer is so moving because we know from our own experience, from the mundane to the dramatic, that sacrifice is at the heart of real love.
The Apostle Paul writes about the kind of love God has for us: “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Jess and I read The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe to our daughters recently. The crowning jewel of the entire series is the resurrection of Aslan. Immediately after the sacrifice of Aslan, the White Witch’s forces leave to prepare for battle, leaving his dead body on the Stone Table. Susan and Lucy Pevensie come out from their hiding spot and weep over him.
Susan and Lucy walk around aimlessly, as the first rays of sunrise break the sky. They are looking at Cair Paravel when, at that moment, they hear a deafening crack. When they turn around, they see that the Stone Table has been broken in half, and Aslan has disappeared.
Lucy asks if this is more magic, and a voice behind her answers her, telling her that it is, indeed, more magic.
When they turn around again, they see Aslan, alive and well. They rush to him, with Susan asking him if he is a ghost. He alleviates their fears, though, with his warm breath. To answer their question, he explains that the Witch was right, that The Deep Magic had decreed that all traitors' lives are forfeited to her, but if she had looked back before the dawn of time, she would have read a different incantation:
....."It means that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still .....which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she .....could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time .....dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known .....that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's .....stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards."
“Greater love has no one than this,” Jesus tells his followers, “to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Our Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry, has called us to follow Jesus in the Way of Love. What is our response to death itself working backwards? What does it mean to have your life changed by Jesus’s self-sacrificial love? Paul spells it out for us, we are to “Walk in love, just as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us as a fragrant sacrificial offering to God.”
As you go about your week, keep a sharp eye out for opportunities in which you might give—in love—of yourself; your time, your energy, your resources, and you will find yourself walking in the Way of Love.
Peter+
