There is a love which gives life and a love which deals death, a love that fuels our flourishing and a love that leads to annihilation. The history of humanity, in fact the history of the entire cosmos, is the story of these two loves — or, more accurately, real love and that which poses as love, but which can only exist as an inverted and deformed caricature, a weak counterfeit for genuine love. Real love, the only love worthy of the name, is, of course, divine love, as all genuine love has its origins in the very life of God. This is the love that is manifested in its fullness in the person of Jesus.

The Scriptures are the story of that love, which freely creates and gratuitously gives, and how, in the face of human self-centeredness, that divine love, pulsing through the history of Israel, keeps striving to emerge, to burst forth, to manifest itself fully to those creatures who so freely and foolishly and frequently ignore or even reject it. Sound familiar? It is also, of course, pretty much the story of our daily life. Daily, we face an inner battle, an interior struggle, often moment by moment, between a driving self-love, a pounding egoism, an inner push to promote ourselves, a craving for prestige and self-glorification, and the gentle promptings, deriving from grace, of a much different kind of love, a love more drawn to contemplate than to leer, to give rather than to possess or dominate, a love like God’s love for Israel — long-suffering, patient, merciful and truly free.

As disciples and, yes, even as priests, our go-to love is not quite like that. Our love, left to its own devices, resorts to self-absorption, self-assertion and a willfulness often degraded to compulsion, within and without. How many of us have experienced ourselves mysteriously beholden to and in the grip of this contorted love and its twisted compulsions? And how, in the face of that, has real, divine love entered to save us? Totally unexpectedly — and undeservedly — humbly cloaked in an infant’s vulnerability on an otherwise dark night in Bethlehem.

Divine Love

And how does this love fulfill its mission? In much the same way — in weakness, humiliation and utter destitution — on a bleak Friday afternoon: The vulnerabilities of the infant of Bethlehem are exposed fully at Calvary, as Christ crucified abandons everything, absolutely everything, into his Father’s hands, and thus becomes the freest person who ever lived. Here is Christ the teacher; not in a classroom, lecture hall or pulpit, but pinned to a tree, where the mysterious gift he made during a meal the night before now suddenly has a content and a context: his life, whole and entire, offered and received. This real, divine love is both crucified and cruciform.

And the Word-made-flesh tutors and catechizes our love, teaching us not so much by mere example (which could be done by any virtuous person), but by imparting his own life to us. Example alone is simply not enough; we can all see good examples all the time, yet fail to change, fail to be fully converted, fail to love. Our love must be crucified, and our life cruciform. And he comes to us, through the ministry of our hands, imparts his own life to us and to our people. And it is in this way — and only in this way — that his love, real love, divine love, can take root and blossom in our lives and thus in our world. Our world can then become his world once again, and our life become his life, pulsing in us and through us.

The sacred liturgy, the Mass, which we are privileged to offer each day, is where he teaches us, by imparting his life to us. He speaks to us, deeply and personally, in his word proclaimed, and he feeds us, animating us with his life, filling us with his love, in the Eucharist. He doesn’t just tell us how to love; he doesn’t just show us how to love. Jesus, dead and risen, lives in us so that we can love, and loves in us so that we can live. And only when we are fed can we offer anything to others. 

MSGR. MICHAEL HEINTZ is pastor of St. Pius X parish in Granger, Indiana, and the visiting director of the Marten Program in Homiletics and Liturgics at the University of Notre Dame.