True love is always linked to sacrifice

THAT’S how true love is. Without sacrifice, love at best can only be apparent. For love to be true, it will always involve sacrifice and great effort, considering the way we really are as God’s children as well as the way we are now in our earthly condition, marked as it is by our woundedness.

Genuine love for one another will always involve sacrifice simply because it cannot avoid the certainty that it will always entail understanding, compassion, the willingness to bear the burden of the others, and ultimately to offer mercy and to forgive to anyone who may do us wrong. It will always involve a total self-giving that is not only gratuitous but continues to give and give even if it’s not reciprocated or, worse, contradicted.

For love to be true, it has to reflect Christ’s love for all of us, irrespective of how we are to him. And that’s simply because whether we are good or not to God, God will continue to love for the basic reason that we are all his children.

A hallmark of genuine love is when we are willing to give up our own interest for God and for everybody else, reflecting the ultimate expression of love of Christ to all of us when he made himself a sacrifice on the cross.

Yes, we can say that true love expresses itself in sacrifice. In other words, given our wounded condition here on earth, sacrifice is the very language of love. Love cannot truly be love without sacrifice.

This means that unless we love the cross, we can never say that we are truly loving. Of course, we have to qualify that assertion. It’s when we love the cross the way God wills it—the way Christ loved it—that we can really say that we are loving as we should, or loving with the fullness of love.

We have to be wary of our tendency to limit our loving to ways and forms that give us some benefits alone, be it material, moral or spiritual. While they are also a form of love, they are not yet the fullness of love.

So, let’s be clear about this point. Love will always require sacrifice. Where there is no sacrifice, there cannot be love. Love grows only to the extent that we are willing to make sacrifices. Without sacrifice, we sooner or later will be swallowed up by our own egoism, our own selfishness.

And this selfishness can take the form of laziness, attachment to certain things to the point of self-absorption, etc. We have to be ready to do battle against these anomalous tendencies of ours.

We should always remember that the very essence of love is self-giving. In love, the lover needs to lose himself in his beloved. He has to be identified with his beloved. And this will always involve self-denial.

The self-giving and losing that love requires would actually enrich the person in his dignity. This way of loving conforms to what Christ himself said: “Whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” (Mt 16,25)

That’s why Christ himself said that if anyone wants to follow him, that person has to deny himself and, in fact, should carry the cross also. Otherwise, he cannot love. And true love is personified in Christ himself.

In other words, we can only love truly when we identify ourselves with Christ who precisely commanded us to love one another as he himself has loved us. That is why, he once said: “As the Father has loved me, I also have loved you. Abide in my love.” (Jn 15,9)