A Meditation for Holy Week: Love and Death

But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. - Romans 5:8

Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. - John 15:13

Christ on the Cross is the perfect sacrifice because he there embodies perfect love. The immense power of all the wickedness, scorn, and sin of the ages, when heaped upon his broken body, is met with a power infinitely greater: Love. Perfect love. And love covers all offenses. Christ’s death was not merely necessary to satisfy justice, but since only through death—a good, sacrificial death—is wickedness definitively undone, his perfect death provided true atonement for the wickedness of the ages: the sin of the world vanishes before the death of Christ as a wisp of smoke before a gale-force wind. In the beauty of God, Death, the last enemy, the wages of sin, is precisely the vehicle through which Death is overcome. Love is the giving of oneself for the sake of the other. Perfect love is giving all; perfect love is self death.

When we are baptized, we are incorporated into Christ’s death. It is no coincidence that water, the matter of baptism, is simultaneously a symbol of chaos and evil in ancient Hebrew thought and a sign of cleansing in the Law and the Prophets. Christ’s side would not have been pierced but for the evil of humanity, and yet evil is drowned in the flood which flows from him. It is no mistake that water both flooded the earth in God’s judgment and flowed from Christ’s side in God’s mercy. God’s great mercy could not have been fulfilled without God’s judgment upon the sin of the world, yet mercy triumphs over judgment. Perfect love undoes Death through Death.

What’s more, when we are joined to Christ’s death through baptism, we ourselves assume the character of perfect love, for he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. God’s righteousness is the victory of perfect love, which we cannot claim for ourselves unless it should become the character of our life. As Bonhoeffer said, "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” True love is death to self. Our Christian lives therefore evince the perfect love of God through the sacrificial nature of our deeds, empowered by our incorporation into Christ’s death through baptism, by the working of the Holy Spirit.

It should come as no surprise, either, that baptism is essentially a communal sacrifice: the one baptized is incorporated into Christ’s death and into his Mystical Body, the Church. Perfect love cannot exist with a subject alone. When we are incorporated into Christ’s death, and we assume the character of that death, it can mean nothing else that we assume his perfect love for the Father and for all of humanity. As his body breaks and blood flows to reconcile the world to himself, who lives in perfect love with the Father, we who are incorporated into his body through baptism are entrusted with the message of reconciliation.

And how do we manifest that message? No other way than always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. The Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life precisely in this way—it molds the Church, the Body of Christ, into a cruciform shape. As we are nourished by Christ’s body broken for us and his blood shed for us, our mortal bodies take on the essence of perfect love, of the death of the self for the sake of the other. Only this perfect love—but certainly this perfect love—is able to be the eternal unmaking of sin and death, and moreover, to restore to us our true and eternal self.