Exceeding Love

(Wine Press - found here)

“When the Eternal Father saw that we were all dead, and deprived of his grace by sin, what did he do? for the immense love, even, as the Apostle writes, for the too great love he bore us, he sent his beloved Son to make atonement for us; and so to restore to us that life which sin had robbed us of: Who through his exceeding love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in sins, has brought us to life together in Christ. And in granting us his Son (not sparing his Son, that he might spare us), he has granted us every good together with him, his grace, his love, and paradise, since assuredly all these gifts are much less than that of his Son: He that spared not even His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how has He not also with Him given us all things?

And so, likewise, the Son, through his love towards us, has given himself wholly to us: Who loved me, and delivered Himself for me. In order to redeem us from everlasting death, and to recover for us the divine grace and heaven which we had forfeited, he became man, and put on flesh like our own: And the Word was made flesh. Behold, then, a God reduced to nothingness: But emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, . . . and in the likeness of man. Behold the sovereign of the world humbling himself so low as to assume the form of a servant, and to subject himself to all the miseries which the rest of men endure.

But what is more astonishing still is, that he could very well have saved us without dying and without suffering at all; but no: he chose a life of sorrow and contempt, and a death of bitterness and ignominy even to the expiring on a cross, the gibbet of infamy, the award of vilest criminals: He humbled Himself, becoming obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross. But why, if he could have ransomed us without suffering, why should he choose to die, and to die on a cross? To show us how he loved us. He loved us, and delivered Himself for us. He loved us, and because he loved us, he delivered himself up to sorrows, and disgraces, and to a death more cruel than ever any man endured in this world.

Hence that great lover of Jesus Christ, St. Paul, took occasion to say: The love of Christ presses us. Wishing to show us by these words that it is not so much the sufferings themselves of Jesus Christ as his love in enduring them, that obliges us, and, as it were, constrains us to love him. Let us hear what St. Francis de Sales says on this text: ‘When we remember that Jesus Christ, true God, has loved us to such an excess as to suffer death, and the death of the cross, for us, our hearts are, as it were, put in a wine-press, and suffer violence, until love be extorted from them, but a violence which, the stronger it is, becomes the more delightful.’”

~St. Alphonsus Liguori