Romans 5:1-11 (ESV) 1 Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. 2 Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. 3 Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. 6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— 8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
It is a difficult thing to do – to admit our weakness. Yet that is what we are. We are weak, and so words like “ungodly”, “sinners” often offend our sense of self. We are not that kind of people, are we. We aren’t! We were, but we’re no longer tied to that millstone because of what Jesus has done for us. And now we have a new identity, one that is profoundly impacted by God’s grace and what Christ Jesus has done for us on the cross.
On the evening before his death, Jesus told his apostles, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). On the cross he gave them the example of ultimate love, dying for their sake and that of all humankind. From the earliest days of the Church to the present, countless followers of Jesus have taken his words and his example to heart, denying themselves and selflessly giving their lives for others.
In Auschwitz, the Nazi extermination camp, Franciscan priest Fr. Maximilian Kolbe volunteered to take the place of Francis Gajowniczek, a Polish soldier who had been chosen to be a victim of retaliatory execution for the escape of a prisoner. Fr. Kolbe told the Nazi commandant: “I am a Catholic priest from Poland; I would like to take his place, because he has a wife and children.” The commandant obliged, returning Gajowniczek to the camp ranks and confining Kolbe and nine other chosen prisoners in a starvation bunker. After being deprived of food and water for fourteen days, Kolbe and three others who were still alive were given lethal injections by the camp executioner. Pope John Paul II called Maximilian Kolbe a “martyr of love” and declared him a saint in 1982.
It’s hard to imagine that kind of sacrificial love.
It also took place on April 30, 1997, when the African nation of Burundi was torn by ethnic wars. Hutu rebels invaded the small Catholic seminary in Buta. Armed with knives, machetes, clubs, and machine guns, the rebels told the young seminarians to divide into two ethnic groups, Hutus and Tutsis. Even though the Hutu students could have saved their lives by separating themselves from the Tutsis, they refused to abandon their classmates. Ultimately, the assailants massacred the forty-one Hutu and Tutsi companions together, “martyrs of brotherhood.”
These supreme acts of love seem above us at times, but they happen only through the gifts of grace that the Holy Spirit gives to people at times like this What' crucial is to remember, that the Holy Spirit gives us these same gifts of grace every day, if only we will be open to God's love coming in.
“No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).
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