The Risk of Love

 

 

The past year or so we have all, perhaps, become increasingly aware of our humanity; reminded daily of our fragility, our mortality, and increasingly aware of those connections that make us human in their absence.

As this Easter approaches, I’ve found myself re–reading Herbert McCabe on the Easter triduum – particularly his sermon on Good Friday, in which he emphasises and re–examines Christ’s humanity. He remarks upon how we see in the Gospels that Jesus doesn’t want the cross – especially in Matthew, Mark, and Luke – “not my will but thine be done.” He is recognisably human in the Garden of Gethsemane. He panics. He is in obvious distress.

It’s often tempting to take this route, to see Christ as most human when He’s experiencing moments of pain or distress, united with us in our suffering. Perhaps there is more reason than ever, this year, to do this. But McCabe offers a powerful, differing view of Christ’s humanity: “As I see it, not Adam but Jesus was the first human being, the first member of the human race in whom humanity came to fulfilment, for whom to live was simply to love – for this is what human beings are for.”

Christ, for McCabe, represents the fulfilment of humanity in his capacity for love. He is “the human being we dare not be. He takes the risks of love which we recognise as risks and so for the most part do not take.” McCabe goes further on the risk of love in separate sermons in God Matters, at one point remarking that: “If you do not love, you will not be alive. If you do love, you will be killed.”

Love, of course, makes us vulnerable to loss, to heartbreak. There has been too much of that of late, and I suspect it won’t go unremarked upon in sermons across the land that we celebrate this time of victory over death at the same time that the worst of a deadly pandemic appears to be behind us. As we emerge renewed from another Easter season, my hope is that we emerge more like Christ – more willing to take the risk of love.

Pete Whitehead.  Theos