The Metric of the Cross

No matter if it is seeing the same people every day, going to the same job everyday, or even looking at our own tired faces in the bathroom mirror each morning, one thing is fairly certain - repetition leads to ingratitude, ingratitude leads to complacency, and complacency leads to death.  

Our lives may not seem very exciting.  In fact, I’m sure that the monotonous schedule of waking, working, and sleeping would lead us to believe that our lives are incredibly dull.  Sure, we may have small peaks of excitement when we travel or meet someone new, but soon the newness fades and the gray order of our lives is once again restored to its proper place.  

I know many in the pews can feel this way about going to Mass.  The weekly ritual may occasionally bring a spark to our lives, but oftentimes, it's much more comfortable to settle into the routine of finding the same pew, enduring the talking, standing, kneeling, and sitting, and then rushing out of the parking lot as whatever happened for the last hour becomes nothing but a faint memory.  We’ve punched the card and paid our dues - St. Peter better have marked that down so I can get the fast pass into heavenly glory when the time comes. 

Did Jesus really die on a cross so that the sum total of my faith experience is being bored for an hour each week? 

Maybe it is a matter of metrics.  

Perhaps our system of measuring something is either slightly or tremendously skewed in a way that it limits our ability to recognize its goodness.  

When we become rooted in sin, our metrics become solely focused on our own self.  Every thing, person, and experience we have is funneled through a self-referential system of balances and scales that tend only to look at what we get out of it.  How much does this benefit me? How much pleasure can I get out of it? How can I avoid giving any of myself up for this? 

Metrics rooted in sin can feel deceptively safe because everything we encounter becomes another piece in the enormous walls that we construct around our hearts.  Our hearts become entombed by the thoughts, words, and actions (or inactions) whose only purpose is to bring me the greatest amount of pleasure and avoid the most pain.  Our hearts were not meant to be suffocated behind the walls of sin - they were made of vulnerability.  If sin has become habituated in our lives, the vulnerability we were made for becomes repulsive as we’ve become convinced that any kind of surrender or act of humility would deprive us of our self rather than restoring it.  

Our hearts - that deepest place within us where we encounter God and out of which our most meaningful relationships with others can take root - are made to be vulnerable.  This vulnerability, however, is a threat to the sinful worldview because instead of everything being about me and what I want, we begin to think about the good of the other. 

When we do encounter genuine and radical love, suddenly the metrics begin to shift and we begin to see the world through a new lens.  

Jesus gave us a healthy metric when he told his friends, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:34–35) Ultimately, this measure of love is shown to us on the cross as Christ tells us, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13)

In a total act of vulnerability, Christ’s heart was on full display as he hung from the cross.  This act of love - repulsive to those steeped in sin - becomes the measure of God’s love for each of us personally as well as the measure of how we ought to love God, neighbor, and self.  

Here we find the metric against which we can measure reality.  Do my thoughts, words, and actions truly desire the good of the other? Am I willing to surrender the ways that I’ve become accustomed to think about others and myself, talk about others and myself, and act towards others and myself if they do not conform with Christ’s measure of vulnerable love? 

So we return once more to our gray worlds - especially our gray Masses with hardened hearts that simply want to check boxes, get through it, demand our way into heaven because “we followed all of the rules!”

If we cannot understand the motivation of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross - that is, love - we will never understand the sacrifice of the Mass.

If we cannot see the fiery Spirit of love that drove Jesus to the desert for forty days and face temptation from the devil, we will not understand how our own trials and tribulations can conform us to the heart of Christ. 

If we cannot see why Christ, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” (Philippians 2:6-8) was all part of a mission of love to restore your relationship with God and offer you the opportunity to be with Him for eternity, then we will never understand the gift of our faith. 

How can we begin to take down the gray walls of indifference and move towards the dynamic depths of a metric that weighs every encounter against love? 

I think it can start with gratitude. A gratitude that even when life becomes repetitive, allows us to enter into each experience with an open heart, just waiting to see how God is loving me through the people I see regularly, my job, and even that same old tired face I see in the mirror each morning. 

Rooting our hearts in gratitude gives us an opportunity that makes every new day seem so new. It leads us to avoid the complacency that so often distorts our hearts into taking people and what we have around us for granted. Ultimately, it rewrites our stories, moving away from death and closer to life. 

The Lord doesn’t want you living in a world without color, without the dynamism of love.  If you find yourself stuck in a place where your vulnerable heart is surrounded with cynicism and self-serving motivations, start asking our God for the grace for a new lens, a new metric against which to measure the world around you.  

Our God does love you.  He truly desires what is good for you, and ultimately, that is Himself.  Spend time with Him today and let Him speak His promise for your life into your heart, “Behold, I am making all things new.” (Revelation 21:5)