What makes you Christian?
How will you answer to this
question, if you are a baptized and confirmed mature Catholic?
Perhaps, you say that it is
to love as Christ has taught, citing his Mandatum
Novum in John 13:34-35, “A new command I give
you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By
this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another”. This new commandment of Jesus, given during
the Last Supper, to love one another as he has loved us, is reflective of the
following words of Jesus:
“The first is this: ‘Hear, O Israel! The
Lord our God is Lord alone! You shall love the Lord your God
with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your
strength. The second is this: ‘You shall love your
neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:29-31).
In this statement on the two
most important commandments, Jesus puts Deuteronomy 6:5 (You
shall love the Lord, your God, with your whole heart, and with your whole
being, and with your whole strength.) and Leviticus 19:18 (You shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.)
together to teach us to love our neighbors – one another – as yourself in
juxtaposition to the way we love God. In fact, Jesus has also made this kind of
dialectical parallel in John 14:20, “In
that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” This indicates that Jesus wants us to know
that what he is to us is a reflection of what the Father is to the Son. He also
wants us to understand that the way we observe his Mandatum Novum is in this reflection.
Yes, being a lover, as Jesus
has taught, finding inspiration in God, who is the greatest lover of all, is a
mark of being Christian. Now, it is important to understand what love really is
for the Christians.
According to Jesus, Christian
love is ultimately symbolically summed up with the Cross. The Cross that Jesus
bore and died on and a cross each of us is to carry as a Christian are in
juxtaposition. With this notion, he has said this as a condition to be a
Christian, “If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself, and
take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). Here, cross that we are to
bear is a reflection of the Cross of Jesus. On his Cross, he died to save us,
whom he loves, reflecting the love of the Father for us, as reflected in John
3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only
Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have
eternal life”. The Father gave up His only begotten Son on
the Cross to save us. This Cross is the ultimate inspiration for us all in
carrying our cross daily to be ready to die for another person, as Christ died
for us, as well as dying for Christ, in defending his name and teaching against
anti-Christ.
Those who have no or
seriously compromised faith find it very difficult to understand the Cross as
love. The kind of love symbolized with the Cross, from which we find meaning
for our cross, is agape, surpassing philos, storge, and eros. Paul has said that agape never fails (1 Corinthians 13:8), and this also means that
the Cross is not a sign of failure or defeat.
Cross was used to execute
non-Roman citizen criminals in the Roman Empire. Thus, in a worldly view, based
on this Roman custom, the Cross can be understood as a sign of the most shameful,
humiliating, and excruciating defeat in death. While Jesus was on the Cross,
dying, those who subscribed to this view mocked him (Mark 15:30). On the contrary,
the faithful Christians, who understands Jesus’ Mandatum Novum in the dialectic context, in which God’s love and
our love are juxtaposed and where we draw inspiration to observe this
commandment, the Cross is the ultimate symbol of the triumphant agape, which cannot be defeated.
There is a clear paradox on symbolic
meaning of the Cross. To those who do not understand Christ’s teaching, it can
symbolize shameful, humiliating, and most painful death. However, to those who
not only understand but to take up his teaching to heart realize that the Cross
symbolize the triumph of love, juxtaposing God’s love and ours.
When he died on the Cross and
resurrected on the third day from his death, Jesus has turned the Cross from a
symbol of death to the victorious symbol of his love, from which we draw
inspiration of ours to carry our cross. As Moses turned life-threatening
serpents, which indicate God’s punishment for our sins into a life-saving pole,
which signifies God’s saving grace and mercy (Numbers 21:4-9). Because Jesus
can be considered as New Moses, fulfilling his Torah, by turning the Cross from
a sign of humiliating death into the triumphant sign of agape he has commanded to us.
When the blood and water
gushed out of his body (John 19:34), Jesus was on the Cross. Jesus has
explained to St. Maria Faustina that the blood and water symbolize his Divine
Mercy as these are reflected on the red and the light blue rays radiating from
the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the Divine Mercy image given to us through this
Polish Saint.
The two rays denote Blood and Water. The pale ray
stands for the Water which makes souls righteous. The red ray stands for the
Blood which is the life of souls…… These two rays issued forth from the very
depths of My tender mercy when My agonized Heart was opened by a lance on the
Cross. These rays shield souls from the wrath of My Father. Happy is the one
who will dwell in their shelter, for the just hand of God shall not lay hold of
him. I desire that the first Sunday after Easter be the Feast of Mercy.
St. Faustina’s Diary, 299
The triumph of the Cross
means the triumph of Christ’s agape
and his Divine Mercy. Let us lift the Cross high in exaltation!
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