The Coronation of Love

There is a moment in many old films when a soldier, bloodied and weary, is asked what kept him going through the impossible hours of battle. The expected answer is duty. Country. Honor. But the answer that always rings truest, the answer that makes us lean forward in our seats, is something smaller and infinitely larger: her face. A photograph in a pocket. A letter folded a hundred times. A name whispered like a prayer. The soldier did not fight because he loved war or even because he hated the enemy.

He endured because he loved someone, and love made him capable of things courage alone never could.

We understand this instinctively when it comes to soldiers, parents running into burning houses, or strangers diving into icy rivers to save a child. We understand that love does something to a person that fear cannot undo. And yet, when we turn to the pages of the Gospel and find Jesus telling His disciples that they will be hated, hauled before councils, persecuted from town to town, and that they must take up their cross and follow Him, we somehow forget the secret the soldier knew. We read these passages as warnings, as ominous predictions of suffering, as the cost of discipleship tallied up in a ledger.

We rarely read them as love letters.

But that is precisely what they are.

 

The Hard Words

Matthew 10 contains some of the most difficult sayings of Jesus. He tells the Twelve, "When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next; for truly I tell you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes" (Matthew 10:23).. He warns them that "a disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above the master" (Matthew 10:24), and that if the master of the house has been called Beelzebul, his household will fare no better.

Then come the words that have made cowards of many of us at one time or another: "Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell" (Matthew 10:28). And then: "Whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it" (Matthew 10:38–39).

These are not gentle words. They are not the sayings we cross-stitch onto pillows.

They are the kind of words that make us close the Bible and find something else to do. We hear them and feel the weight of an impossible call, a demand we cannot meet, a price we are not sure we are willing to pay.

And here is where we must stop and ask a question that changes everything: Why did the apostles, who heard these very words and clearly did not understand them at the time, eventually go to their deaths with joy?

Why did Peter ask to be crucified upside down? Why did Andrew greet his cross with what tradition records as a hymn of welcome? Why did Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to be devoured by beasts in the Roman colosseum, write to the Christians of Rome begging them not to intervene on his behalf? "Suffer me to be eaten by the beasts, through whom I can attain to God" (Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Romans, 4).

These men were not insane. They were not death-obsessed fanatics.

They were not even particularly brave, if we are honest.

Peter denied his Lord three times around a charcoal fire because a servant girl asked an awkward question. Something happened to these men between the trembling night of Holy Thursday and the bold proclamations of Pentecost and beyond. Something changed them so fundamentally that the very words they had once found terrifying became, in time, the words they staked their lives upon.

What changed?

 

The Secret of the Saints

There is a story from the deathbed of St. Thérèse of Lisieux that pierces straight to the heart of this mystery. Her sister Celine was speaking to her about the happiness of heaven, the joy that awaited her, the rest from suffering. And Thérèse, this young Carmelite who had endured a year of agonizing tuberculosis with extraordinary peace, responded: "No, that's not what attracts me." When Celine asked what did attract her, Thérèse answered: "Oh! it's Love! To love, to be loved, and to return to the earth to make Love loved" (St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Her Last Conversations, July 12, p. 194).

Here, in the whispered words of a dying twenty-four-year-old, is the secret. Here is what made the timid bold and the fearful unflinching. Here is what transformed the apostles from men hiding behind locked doors into preachers who could not be silenced by stones or swords or crosses.

The martyrs did not run toward death. They ran toward Love.

St. Thérèse also believed that to be encountered by Love Himself, to be thus perfected in Love, would persist for the sake of those on earth. She wished, quite fervently, that even in death Christ might send her back to earth to make "Love loved," to continue through love, to keep on loving everyone Christ loves because, in the end, to be united to His love, is to love what He loves. We could tell innumerable stories about how St. Thérèse has shown such love to thousands even after the end of her earthly life, both through her writings, and through miraculous events. But the point in today's message is that it is love that is the destination.

We do not long for heaven just because it sounds like a nice neighborhood to live in. We long for heaven because that is where we shall encounter Love Himself in all the fullness of who He is.

For St. Thérèse, for the apostles who became martyrs, and for every martyr thereafter who died with hymns on their lips, death was no threat. Death simply happened to stand in the way, and once Love was the destination, death lost its terror. It became, as St. Paul would write, no longer an enemy but a doorway: "O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?" (1 Corinthians 15:55).

This is what the disciples could not yet see when Jesus spoke the difficult words of Matthew 10. They heard the call to take up the cross, and it sounded to them like a sentence. They had not yet seen what the cross actually was. They would only understand later, after Calvary, after the empty tomb, after the breath of the Spirit fell upon them in the upper room.

Then they would look back on the cross and see not a lament of death but the profoundest display of love the world had ever witnessed.

They would see proof, written in the very blood of God, that they were loved at the irresistible value of the life of the Son of God Himself.

When you know yourself loved like that, everything changes.

 

The Cross Reread

Look again at the cross with this in mind. What do you see first? Do you see the nails, the thorns, the wound in the side, the gasping breath, the agony? Or do you see something else? Do you see two arms stretched wide in a posture that says, "This much. I love you this much, and there is no end to it"?

St. Augustine once wrote that Christ on the cross is like a bridegroom mounting the marriage bed, and that what looks to the world like death is in fact the consummation of a love story older than time (cf. Augustine, Sermon 218). This is not pious sentimentality. This is the way the early Church saw what happened on Golgotha.

The cross was the wedding of God to humanity, written in the language God speaks most fluently, which is the language of self-gift.

And here is the staggering thing: if the cross is love, then to take up our own cross is to enter that love.

It is not to imitate suffering for the sake of suffering. It is not to manufacture pain to prove our devotion. It is to allow ourselves to be drawn so deeply into the love of Christ that we begin, however falteringly, to love as He loves.

And anyone who has ever truly loved knows that love costs. Love that costs nothing is not love at all. It is sentiment, or transaction, or self-interest dressed in love's clothing.

The martyrs understood this. So did Thérèse, who never shed her blood but who suffered the daily white martyrdom of the cloister, the small humiliations, the cold winters, the irritating sister who splashed dirty water during laundry, the long obscure illness. She wrote of these as her means of making Love loved.

The crown of martyrdom, she saw, was simply an ornament added to a crown that every baptized soul already wears. The real coronation had happened in the waters of baptism, when she was joined to Christ. The blood, when it comes for any saint, only makes visible what was already true.

 

Heaven Is Not the Point

This brings us to a subtle but crucial point that Thérèse grasped with extraordinary clarity, and that many of us miss. Heaven, as a destination, can become a self-referential reward. It can become the celestial equivalent of a retirement package, a thing we want for ourselves, a quantifiable benefit.

Many Christians live their whole lives oriented toward heaven in just this way, and there is nothing wrong with longing for heaven. Jesus Himself promises it.

But Thérèse saw further. She saw that heaven is heaven because Love is there.

Take away the Beloved, and heaven becomes merely a pleasant location. The whole point of heaven is Him. "This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent" (John 17:3).

Eternal life is not a place. It is a Person known and loved without veil.

When this becomes our orientation, the difficult sayings of Matthew 10 stop being threats and start being invitations. "Those who lose their life for my sake will find it" (Matthew 10:39) is not a riddle. It is the simplest truth in the universe. The life we cling to so tightly is small, frightened, and ultimately doomed. The life that opens itself in love to Christ, that lets itself be poured out for Him and for others, finds itself swept up into a life that cannot die.

 

Living This Today

Most of us will not be asked to shed our blood for Christ. But all of us are asked, every single day, to make small choices that either feed our love for Him or starve it. Here are a few ways to let this devotion take root in the soil of an ordinary week.

First, reread your own cross. Whatever it is that weighs on you right now, the difficult relationship, the illness, the disappointment, the financial pressure, sit with it for a moment and ask: Where is Love hidden in this? Not in a sentimental way, but seriously. Christ did not avoid His cross, and He does not promise to remove yours. But He promises to be in it with you, and to transform it from a sentence into a gift, if you will let Him.

Second, examine your motives in following Christ. Are you serving God primarily to secure your eternal future, or because you have begun to know Him and love Him? There is no shame in starting with the first. Most of us do. But ask the Holy Spirit to draw you deeper, into love that wants Him for His own sake.

Third, find one small way today to "make Love loved." A kindness no one will notice. A prayer for someone who has hurt you. A patient response when impatience would be easier. A moment of silent adoration. These are the seeds from which martyrs grow.

The crown is already on your head. The Beloved is already with you. The cross, when it comes, is only the moment Love takes off its veil.