God proves God’s love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us. This powerful proclamation of St. Paul should be a rich source of reflection for us as we continue our Lenten journey.
God proves God’s love for us… God has nothing to prove! We are creatures and by right we have no expectation that our Creator will love us. A Creator can create a creature that the Creator does not love. It is remarkable, therefore, that we believe in a God who not only loves us, creatures of God that we are, but that this God wants to dispel any doubt in our mind that God does, indeed, love us. How privileged we are to believe in a God who not only loves us as God does, but who is intent on demonstrating the depth of God’s love for us so that we can always have complete confidence in the steadfast love of God for us.
How does God prove God’s love for us? While we were still sinners Christ died for us. Jesus was fully human and fully divine. Jesus was and is God. In his humanity, Jesus embraced his own suffering and death so as to free us from the power of sin and death through his own victory over suffering and death. By his cross and resurrection, Jesus has freed us from the power of sin, suffering, evil and death. Did we deserve such a remarkable gift? If you said, “Yes” then you are either a saint or badly deluded! If we had a thousand lifetimes, we could never earn or merit the tremendous gift of our salvation that was won for us by the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We are sinners. We do not live in complete faithfulness to what God expects of us as sons and daughters of God. Yet God, in the person of Jesus, embraced suffering and death so as to give us the hope of everlasting life. How much more can God do to prove God’s love for us that the innocent man, Jesus, died for us who are guilty of sin?
In gratitude for the love of God for us, may we use this Lenten season to diminish the power of sin in our lives and allow the love of Christ to manifest itself more strongly in our lives.