Daily Reading for April 28
The wisdom of the cross was, then, the disclosure not only of human morality but of divine love. Placing this at the center of his description of what Christ had done by his life and his death, Peter Abelard, in a sermonic essay entitled “The Cross,” emphasized that the love of God in Christ lay beyond “our own power to share in the passion of Jesus by our suffering and to follow him by carrying our own cross.” Therefore he insisted that it was unfair to accuse him of teaching that Christ had only provided an example for our imitation, as though such imitation were possible for the powers of an unaided human nature to achieve. On the contrary, the fundamental meaning of the wisdom of the cross was that contained in the words of Jesus in the Gospel of John: “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).
Such love had its ground and origin only in God; but from God it came to humanity, and it did so through the cross. For “by the faith which we have concerning Christ, love is increased in us, through the conviction that God in Christ has united our nature to himself and that by suffering in that nature he has demonstrated to us the supreme love of which he speaks.” Nowhere else but in Jesus and in his cross was the true nature of love visible. The purpose of the cross, therefore, was to bring about a change in sinners, to thaw their frozen hearts with the warmth of the sunshine of divine love. Christ did not die on the cross to change the mind of God (which, like everything about God, was unchangeable), but to “reveal the love [of God] to us or to convince us how much we ought to love him ‘who did not spare even his own Son’ for us.” True love was self-sacrificing love, and God had demonstrated it uniquely by giving up his own Son to the death of the cross. This exhibited the authentic nature of love and the depth of divine love, thus making human love, even self-sacrificing human love, possible.
From Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture by Jaroslav Pelikan (Perennial Library, 1985).