Jesus is a lover.
And he will be a lover forever, a lover of both you and me.
For it was love that conceived him in the flesh; it was love that held him to the cross. And it was love, the most tender and gentle of all loves, that raised him from the dead.
But this love of Jesus, the love he has for each and every one of us, is no ordinary kind of love; it is a maddening love.
It is maddening insofar as you and I cannot fully understand the measure by which Jesus loves us. It is maddening to us because Jesus loves us without measure, without end, and such a love seems unreasonable, even absurd, given the asymmetry between the greatness of He who is and we who are not. But to Jesus, this love is not unreasonable; it is not foolish. Rather, it admits and will always admit of a hidden, and yet profound rationality.
To us, then, Jesus is not just any lover, he is a mad lover, an absurd lover, a lover who loves his beloved without rule or measure. This quality of “measurelessness” is the very rule or measure by which Jesus loves us, for it is the very rule or measure of perfect charity. It is precisely here, in the “measureless” quality of his perfect love, that the madness of Jesus becomes, for those who have faith, completely and utterly reasonable.
Jesus is a mad lover because he is the perfect lover. And he conveyed the intensity and the immediacy of this perfect love by his death on the cross. While it was possible for Jesus to prove his love for you and for me by another means, by another way, it would not have sufficed for this mad lover. He chose death by crucifixion because it was the means, and perhaps the only means, by which and through which he could prove the extent of his maddening love for us. It was a death that held nothing back, a death that had no measure or rule. As such, the cross is, and will forever be, a proof of his madness, a proof of his maddeningly perfect love for you and for me.
So Jesus is a lover, a mad lover.
And he desires that you and I come to know him specifically as this sort of lover.
Such is why the wounds of Jesus adorn his sacred body not only before the resurrection, but for all time. In his wounds, Jesus proves beyond doubt that he is a mad lover. They are not simply the scars of our salvation; they are coveted trophies of his madness.
Jesus is a mad lover.
And this lover of ours has indeed risen from the dead. He rose on account of his maddeningly perfect love for us, a love that has no compare, no equal.
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Image: Rembrandt, The Head of Christ
