My Favorite Scripture Verse

Romans 5:7-8

“7 Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. 8 But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.”

Now, I know I’m breaking the rules here, since Jim only asked me for one verse and I’m providing two. But to be fair, I would provide the whole book of Romans if I could, so really Jim should be grateful he’s only getting two verses 🙂. When I think about what sacrificial love looks like, this is it. Love that cares not what the other has done or can do. Acts of love knowing full well they cannot be returned or repaid. Verse ten even goes so far as to say that Christ reconciled us while we were His enemies. Wow. These verses demonstrate the reality that the Christian life is not about what I can do for God, but what He has already done for me. It is not that I love God but that He so radically and fully loves me in a truly transformative way.

A priest friend of mine from the Diocese of Rockford, Illinois (my home diocese) told me how he loves saying that God’s generosity is scandalous. He enjoys watching all the church ladies gasp in their pews. “Scandalous?” they think. “God?!? No, God cannot be scandalous.”

Well, frankly, I disagree, and I would actually posit one thing further. Yes, His generosity is scandalous, but so is His Love, the very core of Who He is. Look at the Incarnation. God, the Creator of the universe, of everything, became His creation. The Eternal Word chose to confine Himself to mortality and all that comes with it. But if that wasn’t enough, He allowed Himself to be brutally beaten, tortured, and killed at the hands of His creation, all for love of them. It would seem to me that if you can look at a crucifix and not call that kind of love scandalous, then you don’t grasp the reality of what happened on that day.

But God goes even further, humbling Himself to become a piece of bread. If humanity was the pinnacle of God’s creation, then surely this is a greater act of scandalous love by becoming something lower than man. And He does this daily for love of us. It is one of His greatest joys to be reverently and joyfully welcomed into our beings through reception of the Eucharist. This gift is so good that there is absolutely nothing we could ever do to earn it. It, like all graces of God, is pure gift. 

And why does He do all of this? To bring us into relationship with Him. That is the purpose of the whole Christian life. It is not to “be a good person” like the world so often wants us to believe. This watered-down version of Christianity leads to greater lukewarmness because it is based on nothing real or substantial. The true goal is to join in communion with the Holy Trinity and to become partakers of the divine life; in other words, to grow in relationship with God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and to live out of that relationship above all else. This relationship then teaches us how to love, teaches us how to lay down our lives for others as Christ did on Calvary.

God’s love is scandalous when viewed correctly. If we truly understood what it means when we hear and say “God loves you,” we would probably curl up into a ball and cry because that is the only response for such a faithful love as this towards us who are unworthy. He is the Lover who will always take us back no matter how hard we run, or how far we turn from Him, or how much we sin. Even after rejecting Him, doing the very acts which put Him on the cross in the first place, Jesus still chooses to die for me on Calvary. That is where He forever proved His Love for me. What can I do but love Him in return?