In a recent study, researchers discovered that giving children specific chores teaches such values as responsibility, dedication, and hard work. In order to have a lasting impact on these values and build upon such attributes, adding things like kindness, patience, and more significantly, love and trust, it is important that the father fully participate alongside his child as they carry out the task together. This not only instructs the child in how to carry out his daily life, but it also builds a lasting relationship between the father and the child. What a strange revelation...
As I heard the results of this study, I was reminded of the very life and death of Christ. Jesus was born on this Earth as one of us while still God. He lives a scandalous yet revolutionary life, eating with sinners and the outcasts of society, touches lepers, the sick, and the demon-possessed, and suffers this excruciating death on a cross, all for what reason?
As one of us, in working and suffering alongside us, Jesus gives us instruction and the perfect example of how to carry out our daily lives. In scenes like the one in John 13 where Jesus washes his disciples’ feet, he says, “...I have given you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.” However, he was not only setting the example in facing life but also in facing death. In agony while in Gethsemane, he cries out in prayer, “Abba, Father...not what I will, but your will be done.”
In Mark 12:28-34, a scribe approaches Jesus with a question. “Which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus responds, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” When the scribe affirms Jesus saying that this commandment to love God and love others is greater than any offering or sacrifice, Jesus tells him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”
In facing life and death, Christ gave us the perfect example of how we love God and love others, and it is on the cross that he is the ultimate model of the kingdom of God. Some have even compared the form of the cross, the cruciform, to this greatest command, the vertical beam representing the love for God and the horizontal beam and outstretched arms as Jesus’ love for others; the two come together at the point of intersection, the point of the cross.
Jesus calls us as his disciples to follow him along the way, the way to the cross; however, he does not just give us the instruction and expect us to follow. He walks with us each step, working hand in hand with us in this kingdom movement, and, through his suffering, cruciform love, he shows us how we are to live out our daily lives, loving God and loving others. Even greater than this, he freely offers us a relationship with the Father. As Paul states, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.”
May we come to know our Father who offers himself to us daily, who wants to have a deep relationship with us so much that he suffers alongside us and sacrificed his son for our sake. May we learn from his example and offer ourselves daily in the cruciform love.
-Matt
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