There are numerous, at times seemingly infinite, numbers of people at work who annoy me. I'm usually in the office 45 hours a week, and am awake a total of 100 hours each week. So, that's about 45% of my waking time spent at work. Plenty if time to get annoyed.
I learned to a mental trick when people would annoy me: I would thin of each annoying person as Christ, just returning from teaching the multitudes, or being abandoned after disclosing his intent to remain among them as Eucharist, or healing a paralytic. I'd try to see in that annoying person the image of a weary, emptied, and loving Christ. I stopped doing that, because I began to get annoyed at Christ, too.
But it brings up the importance of seeing beyond the obvious, or beyond the immediately apparent. If the devil's in the details, then the LORD is certainly equally overlooked in the big picture. By pulling myself out of the situation and seeing my need for love and Christ's perfecting touch, it moves the picture: no longer s that person annoying me, but I'm really annoying myself. And who really wants to annoy himself. So I stop.
It actually works, I've found. of course, that's assuming I actually disciplined myself to practice it. Ah, the devil's in the details with that one, too!
Christ loved us enough to die for us, and a death that was most shameful and embarrassing to his followers. The LORD was nailed to the tree as destroyed like a criminal, alongside criminals and notorious sinners. What love have we to do so for our fellow man, as Christ enjoined us wit his new commandment?
It struck me particularly this last Sunday during the Passion when the crowd calls out for Jesus who is called the Messiah to suffer crucifixion, and for Judas Barabbas to be freed. The Hebrew play on words is subtle and beautiful. Jesus who is called Messiah means: The One Who Saves who is called Anointed. Jesus Barabbas means: The One Who Saves, the Son of the Father (literally, bar abbas). How uncanny is it that two criminals with such eerily contextually similar names would be juxtaposed? One to death, the other to freedom.
This is how much Christ loved us, and how much we should love one another. To give ourselves up in place of a known and hated murderer whose very name mocks God.
We are not given many opportunities to take the place of death-row criminals. But we are given the opportunity to walk with them. We are given the opportunity to die to self and to help those on greater need. We are given the opportunity to educate others about God's beauty. We are given the opportunity to preach the love of the name of Jesus. This is how we can show love to others such as the love shown to us by God in Christ: to give of ourselves freely and to pour ourselves out as a libation so that the wounds which Christ suffers in His people might be mended.
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