Self-giving love is creative and expansive. It embraces everyone because in each and every person it sees the image of God Himself.
Love has its victims. They are those who offer themselves freely to accept it and let it transform their lives in order that they can serve disinterestedly the needy ones.
Today there is a great need for people who follow Jesus’ example to willingly suffer for the well-being of others.
Our Master taught us by His life, sacrificial death and glorious resurrection that: “greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (Jn 15, 13). On the cross, the Crucified Jesus bears witness to His love for us. “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (Jn 12, 24).
In his first letter, Saint Peter reminds us that we received our salvation from His sufferings.
“He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By His wounds you have been healed” (1 Pt 2, 24).
What does it mean to be a victim of love in practice? I found my own answer in trying to live the prayer of peace attributed to Saint Francis, “Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace; where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy.
“O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love; for it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.”
Being a Christian means: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (Jn 3, 30). It is in suffering for others’ conversion and healing that we can truly claim that we nourish “a sincere love of the brethren”, a love which comes “earnestly from the heart” (1 Pt 1, 22), thus becoming Jesus, the Victim of Love.
Fr Mario Attard OFM Cap
San Gwann