Salesian Literature

Chapter 17  :  How our Lord practised perfect charity in all its forms

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As I have dealt at great length with the various states and activities of charity, I now offer you a summary or digest of them, so that you may more easily keep them in mind and act upon them.

 

With us, Christ's love is a compelling motive, says St. Paul (2 Cor. 5:14).  Most assuredly, Theotimus, it impels and constrains us by the infinite charm it exercised throughout the whole work of our redemption, when the kindness of God, our Saviour, dawned on us, his great love for man (Titus 2:11; 3:4).  When it came to loving, after all, what did that divine love leave undone?

 

First of all, he loved us with a gratifying love, for his delight was to have the sons of Adam for his play-fellows (cf. Prov. 8:31) to attract men to him, becoming a man himself.

 

Secondly, he loved us with a benevolent love, bestowing his own divinity upon man, so that man became God.

 

Thirdly, he became one with us by an inscrutable union, in which he adhered and riveted himself so firmly, inseparably, immeasurably to our nature that nothing was ever so closely joined, grafted on to our humanity, as is now the godhead in the person of the Son of God.

 

Fourthly, he flowed out of himself and – you might say – melted his greatness in order to force it into the mould of our littleness; thus he is called the fountain of living water (Jer. 2:13), the dew, the rain from heaven (Is. 45:8).

 

Fifthly, he experienced ecstasy – not only, as St. Denis says,[1] because the extravagance of his loving goodness took him out of himself, as it were, by the extension of his providence and his presence to all things; but also because he has, as St. Paul says (cf. Phil. 2:7), almost renounced, dispossessed himself , drained himself of greatness and glory, relinquished the throne of his inexpressible majesty, even (if we may use the expression) obliterated himself so as to stoop to our humanity, to fill us with his divinity, to overwhelm us with his goodness, to uplift us to his own dignity, and grace us with the divine nature of children of God (cf. Jn. 1:12; 1 Jn. 3:1).

 

He who dwelt in himself now dwells in us; he who abided from eternity in the bosom of the Father (Jn. 1:18), now became mortal on his Mother’s lap.  He who lived eternally by his own divine life now lived in time with a human life; he who had always been God alone would evermore be man too – so enraptured is God by his love for man, so drawn into ecstasy!

 

Sixthly, his love often led to wonderment, as in the case of the centurion (cf. Mt. 8:10) and the Canaanite woman (cf. Mt. 15:28).

 

Seventhly, he contemplated the young man who had kept the commandments ever since he grew up, who wanted to be put in the way of perfection (cf. Mk. 10:21).

 

Eighthly, he found a loving tranquillity among us, and even knew some suspension of sensation in his Mother’s womb and during his childhood.

 

Ninthly, he showed a wondrous tenderness towards little children; he used to take them in his arms and nurse them lovingly (cf. Mk. 10:16).  It was a tenderness he also showed to Martha and Mary (cf. Jn. 11:5), to Lazarus for whom he wept (cf. Jn. 11:35-36), as he also did over the city of Jerusalem (cf. Lk. 19:41).

 

Tenthly, he was impelled by peerless zeal which, as St. Denis says[2], turned into jealousy, for he took away as far as possible the evil from human nature at the risk and the cost of his own life; he drove out the devil; the prince of this world (cf. Jn. 12:31; 14:30), who gave the impression of being his equal and his rival.

 

In the eleventh place, he constantly pined away with love.  What else could have prompted these words of his: There is a baptism I must needs be baptized with, and how impatient am I for its accomplishment! (Lk. 12:50)  The time for his baptism of blood had not arrived, and he was pining for it; his love for us was urging him to rescue us, by his own dying, from eternal death.  Thus he sorrowed and sweated blood in his agony in the garden of Olives (cf. Mt. 26:37, 38; Lk. 22:43-44).

 

Finally, the divine lover died utterly consumed by the fires of love.  This was the result of his charity towards us, and the depth, the strength of his love.  Love could not rest content with giving him a body that could die; death must follow.  So he died by choice, not from force of pain. I am laying down my life, he said, to take it up again afterwards.  Nobody can rob me of it, I lay it down of my own accord.  I am free to lay it down, free tot take it up again (Jn. 10:17-18).

 

Thus the Saviour’s death was a genuine sacrifice, a holocaust, which he himself offered to his Father for our redemption.  Although the agonizing sufferings of his passion were so intense as automatically to have caused the death of any other men, they would never have been the death of him, had he not expressly willed it so, had not the flames of his infinite charity consumed his life.  He was, therefore, priest and victim immolating himself in love, to love, out of love, because of love and of love.

 

Here are burning coals, God knows, Theotimus, heaped upon our hearts to set us all afire with active charity!  It is up to us to love our Saviour who is so good, in view of all his active charity towards us who are so wicked.  With us, then, Christ's love is a compelling motive (2 Cor. 5:14).

 

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[1] The Divine Names 4.

[2]  The Divine Names, 4.

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