In the Aftermath

What is love?

Many would respond by saying, “love is love.” By this, they mean that love is self-evident. It is something unbidden that we experience with deep affection.

You can’t define it. It is what it is. You know it when you feel it.

However, today’s Second Reading gives us a different definition of what love is.

“This is the love I mean,” writes John in his First Epistle, “God’s love for us when he sent his Son to be the sacrifice that takes our sins away.”

God’s love isn’t just a feeling, and it isn’t unbidden or unchosen affection. It is revealed in the very real death and resurrection of Jesus.

His love for us is just as real whether we feel his presence intimately or whether God seems further away than ever. This is because he demonstrated his love for us in self-sacrificing action.

This is what love is: willing and acting for the good of someone else. So much so, as Jesus says, that they would lay down their lives for the one that they love.

Most importantly, God’s love for us has been revealed despite our failures and sins and despite our brokenness and fear. God’s love for us is not about whether or not we deserve it because we definitely do not deserve it.

As Christians, we find ourselves in the aftermath of the greatest act of love in the history of the universe. The perfect sacrifice of Jesus so that we could have a life free from the power of sin and shame.

In the Sacred Heart of Jesus, we find rest for our souls and the real, tangible, and self-sacrificing love that we were made for.