The Greatest Act of Love

Jesus revealed the true nature of love when he died on the cross. All of the miracles during his ministry were supremely important, but they turned out to be merely precursors to his ultimate act of love. All of the healings, the teachings, the confrontations, and his generous kindness, were signs to confirm who he was–God in the flesh–but even they would have not been enough to prove who he was without the cross. God is love, so what does the cross reveal about the nature of love, thus the very nature of God?

Love is Courageous

Mere morality requires a person to be compassionate and kind, but love requires courage. It is not enough to say “I love my family,” but then when someone attacks your family you stand down and let them be harmed because you want to preserve your personal sense of morality. That isn’t love; that is cowardice.

Likewise, it wasn’t enough for God to say he loved humanity unless he had the courage to do something about our sin nature, which separates us from him. The law of God revealed to us our sin, but it took the love of God as expressed in his death on the cross to cure our sin.

Love Strengthens Our Character

Love is not an all-embracing, all-encompassing neutrality to the moral character of the beloved. It isn’t a passively-willed state, but instead is an active, concentrated force which “forges the spiritual center of the individual” (On Resistance to Evil by Force, 74). Or, as Paul said, “[Love] does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth.” Love is a deliberate commitment to the good of another, but not just merely in their material (physical) needs, but to the spiritual needs of growth and maturity. 

Rejoicing in truth means affirming honesty, authenticity, and virtue. Should we alter the truth in order to manipulate the perceptions of people so that they will believe our opinions? True love prioritizes the long-term well-being of another person over allowing them to indulge their immediate pleasures or to engage in behaviors that will harm them.

A loving parent doesn’t cheer a child’s dishonesty, but seeks to correct it. God is our loving Father and he, like a good parent, seeks to teach us right from wrong through his law, but also like a loving parent–in spite of our disobedience–he seeks to save us from our sin so that we will not continue to wallow in it, leading to our destruction.

Love Defeats the Enemies of God

And yet going to the cross not only required courage and the intent to cleanse us from sin, but it was also to defeat Satan and all who would follow him. Jesus’ passivity throughout his suffering on the way to the cross wasn’t an act of weakness, but the ultimate show of strength. Here’s how.

The acts of violence poured out on Jesus are the stuff of nightmares. The betrayal by Judas, a close friend; the fake trial that judged him guilty of crimes he never committed; the lies of so-called witnesses; the brutal beatings; the mockery; the abandonment of all his disciples; the humiliation of hanging on the cross for all to see as if he were guilty; the slow, suffocating, painful death.

As with all the enemies of God, violence to them seems like the winning hand. But what was Satan trying to achieve with this violence? Was he seeking to dissuade Jesus from going to the cross? Did he think the beatings and the shame would so overwhelm Jesus that he would lose his temper and blast everyone into oblivion? Was that what Satan hoped Jesus would do? Or did the cruelty of the Accuser reveal that on a primordial level such violence has no purpose, no plan, and no intent except chaos born of a witheringly cruel will of a passionless, cold soul set on the destruction of all that is good? Was it simply the actions of a being who knew all was lost, and yet here was his opportunity to inflict all possible pain on the one he hated most, whatever may come? 

Perhaps, but I imagine that the sinister intelligence behind the violence wanted Jesus to sin. Satan had to have known that all was lost, so perhaps he felt his only recourse at this stage of his ages old battle with God, was to inflict so much harm that God in the flesh would succumb, finally, to the frailty of the flesh and disobey his duty to die for our sins. Just as he had deceived Eve who then persuaded Adam to sin, maybe he could achieve the same outcome with Jesus by these outrageous acts of violence.

But it was to no avail. Why? Because love is the strongest weapon that God can ever wield, and God is love. In this one act of ultimate love, God singularly undermined Satan’s hold on this world because God’s love prevailed and he endured the suffering inflicted on him. God the Father allowed his innocent son to suffer as if he were a criminal, and Jesus willingly took on that responsibility. But this kind of love was not the “hedonistic tenderness” that is permissive and indulgent, nor was it the “sweetness of sentimental moods” that the world tries to define love as. But, rather, Christ’s love was the courageous, strong love that renews and strengthens the souls of those who believe Jesus rose from the dead.