Did God Love Us Too Much?
March 4, 2021
MEDITATING upon the gruesome and bloody crucifixion of Jesus is too much for most people. Why?
The Rev. Frederick William Faber offered one reason:
It is the excessive love of the Incarnation and the Passion which makes men find it hard to believe those mysteries. We confess it seems to us that he who, on reflection, can receive and embrace those two propositions, that God loves us, and that God desires our love, can find nothing difficult hereafter in the wonders of theology. Another feature of this love is that it is eternal which is in itself an inexplicable mystery. As there never was a moment when God was not in all the plenitude of His self-sufficient majesty, so there never was a moment when He did not love us. He loved us not only in the gross as His creatures, not only as atoms in a mass, as units in a multitude, all grouped together, and not taken singly; but He loved us individually. He loved us with all those distinctions and individualities which make us ourselves, and prevent our being any but ourselves.
[Thoughts on Great Mysteries, selected from the works of Frederick William Faber; Suttaby & Co.: London; 1884.]
People who see in a crucifix only morbid and unpleasant reminders of the finality of life and who think those who meditate devoutly upon the crucifix are psychologically unbalanced are people who don’t see the love. They do not want to see the love. In fact, they do not want the love. They are repelled by this strange offer of friendship. They do not want a friend who loves them that much.
