Reading: Thursday After Ash Wednesday

Jesus Christ Deserves Our Love in Return 5
From the writings of St Alphonsus de Liguori

A person will become perfectly holy by loving Jesus Christ, our God, our chief
good, and our Savior. He himself says that anyone who loves him will be loved by
the eternal Father: “For the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me”.
“Some people,” says St. Francis de Sales, “think that perfection can be found by an
austere life; others make it a matter of much prayer, or of frequenting the
sacraments, or of acts of charity. They are all mistaken. Perfection consists in
loving God with our whole heart…

…He has loved us from the very beginning of eternity: “With age-old love I
have loved you”. God was the first to love you. Before you existed, indeed, even
before the world itself existed, God was already loving you. For as long as he has
been God, he has been loving you.

When God saw how human beings were attracted by good things, he set out
to win them over by his gifts: “I drew them with human cords, / with bands of love”.
Every gift of his was created for human beings. First, he endowed the soul made in
his image with its powers of memory, intellect, and will, and gave it a body with all
its senses, created heaven and earth and all that is in them… everything was an act
of his love. All these created things were for the use of human beings, so that they
love him in return for so many gifts. “The heavens and the earth and everything in
them,” says St. Augustine, “cry out to me that I must love you.”

…There was once a holy hermit. On his walks through the countryside, it
seemed to him as if the wild flowers and plants along the way reminded him of his
ingratitude to God, and he would strike them with his staff, saying, “Be silent, be
silent! You call me ungrateful. You tell me that God has created you out of love for
me, yet I do not love him. I understand you now. Be silent! Be silent! Do not
reproach me anymore.”

God was not content simply to give us a beautiful creation. In order to win us
totally, the Eternal Father has gone so far as to give us his one and only Son: “For
God so loved the world that he gave his only Son”. Seeing us dead and deprived of
grace through sin, in his overwhelming love for us, he sent his Son to make
satisfaction for us, and to restore to us the life which sin had destroyed…

What is even more astonishing is that he could have saved us without dying
and without suffering. Yet he chose a life of affliction and contempt, and a bitter
and ignominious death. He went so far as to die on the shameful scaffold of the
Cross: “He humbled himself, / becoming obedient to death, / even death on a
cross”. If he could have redeemed us without suffering, why then did he choose to
die, and to die on a cross? It was for no other reason than to show his love for us…
That is why St. Paul, the great lover of Jesus Christ, could say “the love of
Christ impels us”. He meant that it was not so much what Jesus Christ has suffered
for us as the love he has shown in suffering for us which obliges us, and indeed
forces us, to love him. Commenting on this text, St. Francis de Sales asks…

“Why, then, do we not throw ourselves on Jesus crucified to die on the cross
along with him who was willed to die there for love of us? I will cling to him, and
will never more abandon him. I will die with him, and be consumed by the fire of
his love. Let the same fire consume the creature as consumes the creator. My Jesus
gives himself totally to me, and I give myself totally to him. I will live and die on his
breast… Savior of our souls, grant that we might sing for ever “May Jesus live whom
I love, I love Jesus who lives for ever and ever.”

5 Alphonsus de Liguori. Selected Writings. New York: Paulist Press, 1999. 112-115.