Loving others more

This week's verse is John 3:16:

For this is the way God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.

 Imagine you were a doctor with important life saving skills. Maybe you could get people free of addictions to heroin, crack, or meth, maybe you could reverse the effects of cancer, maybe you could repair broken and damaged hearts and lungs. 

But imagine you were that doctor, and that you and your family were asked to move to a dangerous neighborhood with bad schools, to help people that nobody else was willing to risk helping. Your skills are indispensable, and without you a lot of people would suffer and die needlessly.

If it was just you, it wouldn't probably seem like a difficult decision. You could count the cost of your one life verses the dozens or hundreds that would be made better through your sacrifice. The problem is, you and your spouse have been trying for years to have a baby, and finally, last spring, you just welcomed a healthy child. That changes everything.

Your one child, your only descendant, your favorite person in the whole world, could be kidnapped, or even killed by a stray bullet. He could be beaten up, rejected and discriminated against because you are an outsider. So, while on the one hand, you could save a lot of people, on the other hand you are offering up the life of your only child for a bunch of people who may or may not even care.

This is the situation God was in when he decided to send Jesus to the cross. It's the situation missionaries and aid workers are in when they move their families to developing nations or war zones. It's the situation we're called to, when we are asked to pick up our cross and follow Jesus.

Would you be willing to sacrifice the most beloved person in your life to save others? Most of us wouldn't. And even if we were, our friends and colleagues would turn on us in judgment for the danger we put our family in. It's a decision that puts everything on the line.

But what if God also had been unwilling to put his son in harm's way? What if he'd decided to protect Jesus instead, sending the angel of death to destroy the Pharisees, laying waste to the Roman Empire with a deadly plague, and evacuating Jesus from the scene in a chariot of fire? All of that would easily have been within his power and his right. If God had prioritized being a "good parent" over everything else, where would that have left us?

In this alternate reality, we would all be damned. We would spend our whole lives facing an eternal sentence of suffering and torment, and there would be nothing we could do about it. Billions or trillions of people would suffer and die, and the Holy Trinity would exist unchanged, except for having been happily spared the annoyance of human contact.

Easter is the celebration of God's willingness to put everything on the line to move to our neighborhood and help us. Even if you can't imagine doing the same thing if you were given the opportunity, you still have to recognize how big of a sacrifice that was, and how totally dependent we are on it.

As Easter season comes this week, and as we spend time with loved ones, think about what the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross entailed for God, and what it means for us.