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What Price Love? |
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What Price Love? There comes a time in every child’s life when he or she learns the value of a day’s work. For some children, this awareness comes with the first lemonade stand or at a family yard sale, at which a few of those piled-up Happy-Meal toys may be redeemed for cold cash. For a certain young boy this awareness arrived one morning just before breakfast. Somehow, he managed to slip under his mother’s plate a folded piece of paper. It was a bill. Scrawled in crayon were these words: for running errands, 25 cents, for being good, 10 cents, for taking piano lessons, 15 cents; for extras, 5 cents. Total, 55 cents.” The young boy’s mother smiled when she saw the note, but said not a word. As he returned for lunch, he discovered to his delight that at his place was a little pile of coins: 55 cents. He discovered something else, as well: another folded piece of paper. Opening it, he read, in his mother’s handwriting, these words:, for nursing him through the chicken pox, nothing; for being good to him, nothing; for clothes, shoes and playthings, nothing; for his playroom, nothing; for his meals, nothing. Total, nothing.” The young boy got the point. He learned a valuable lesson that day, a lesson about love: that it has no price. Love — true love — is literally priceless. Emotional transactions Out in this harsh and unforgiving world of ours, there are those who all too eagerly put a price on love. There are those who seek to market something that bears a superficial resemblance to love, of course, through various shady businesses that thrive in darkened night clubs with flashing neon signs out front. Far more common, though — and more insidious — are those daily emotional transactions in which many of us become enmeshed, within our own intimate relationships. It’s easy for grown-up people, who ought to know better, to practice the same sort of accounting demonstrated by the young boy with his crayoned bill for services rendered. The only difference is, most adults would never dream of putting it down on paper. There may be no bill under the breakfast plate, but still there’s what the lawyers and politicians are fond of calling a quid pro quo. What I’m speaking about is a kind of scorekeeping approach to marriage or family life that can poison intimate relationships. The tally may be kept as a purely mental construct, but make no mistake: The tally is there. Every act of kindness, every favor performed, every expression of affection, comes with a price, which is the expectation that, one day in the not-so-distant future, it will be reciprocated in kind. If too many days pass by without a reasonable number of corresponding gestures, then resentment begins to build. Hostility rears its hideous head. In time, the breakfast table, the family room, even the bedroom, become battlegrounds. That’s what happens when you put a price on love. Kenosis Jesus never put a price on love. That’s one thing that was absolutely and utterly consistent about his life, as we read about it in the gospels. Never did he demand anything in payment for the love he extended to others. Always he offered the gift free of charge and without any expectation that the gift would be reciprocated. In
Jesus cast aside the equality with God that was his birthright and emptied himself of everything the world considers to be of value. Jesus “had it all,” being coeternal with God in heaven. Yet, in coming to earth, he left it all behind. Victims of certain natural disasters, like Hurricane Rita, have had this experience — as they lost homes, possessions, jobs, everything. Many of those hurricane refugees found it to be a profoundly disorienting experience — to end up in a shelter with nothing remaining from their former lives. A few of them even lost their identification. Who were they, then? What status did they have? What was their place in the world? They had a human body and whatever soaked and tattered clothing was on their backs. Apart from rapidly fading memories of homes lost to the hurricanes that was it. Yet, Jesus chose this emptying. It didn’t just happen to him. He chose it. He did so for us, that we might know fullness of life. There’s another place in the Pauline epistles in which we can read of this sort of self-emptying. The letter to the Ephesians contains a passage that has long been used to suggest that men are to be dominant over women, especially in marriage: “Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church.” The writer of these words is merely reflecting the conventional wisdom of his day, the patriarchal structure of family life in the Roman Empire. That sort of hierarchical command structure is one that few today are willing to imitate, and with good reason. Yet, pay close attention to what comes next. This may surprise you: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” Suddenly the price of love has escalated very high indeed. There is no price higher, in fact, than the price paid by Jesus, in shouldering a cross and dragging it to Calvary, in being nailed upon it and watching his life’s blood drain out, along with his last breaths. “Just as I have loved you,” said elsewhere, “you also should love one another.” This necessity of self-giving does not arise from nowhere. It is present in our very genes. The DNA code of both men and women contains 46 chromosomes. In order for new life to begin, the cells coming from each parent must go through a numerical process of reduction, from 46 chromosomes to 23. Without this biological process of self-denial, it is hard to imagine human life at all. Such is God’s plan for biological new life. God’s plan for spiritual new life is similar. It is expressed in Jesus’ selfless action in “emptying himself, taking the form of a servant.” It is lived out in his instruction to “take up the cross and follow me.” An eloquent testimony John Sumwalt tells the story of a prison chaplain who learned from three brothers named Jimenez of what price love can demand. All three Jimenez brothers were serving time at the same prison in Texas. This could only mean, he assumed, that the Jimenez brothers — sons of migrant workers, who had never had much access to education — were chronic lawbreakers, typical dead-enders. He soon learned otherwise. As he spoke with the older brother, Juan, he learned that the other two brothers were both deaf. In fact, of the original family of five, the older brother was the only hearing member. Because the family was constantly on the move while the boys were growing up, the two deaf sons had received little in the way of special education. The family had been forced to develop their own sign-language system to communicate with one another. Juan’s role was clear. His job was to serve as the family’s intermediary with the hearing world. Jobs are hard to come by for the children of migrants in any circumstances, but when those children are deaf, it is nearly impossible. The two deaf brothers became easy recruits for criminals searching for drug “mules” — low-level lawbreakers who transported illegal drugs. Not long after his two brothers were arrested, Juan, too, ran afoul of the law. The chaplain believed he did so deliberately, in order to stay close to his brothers. After several years, the younger brother was released on parole. Six months later, when half his 10 year sentence had been completed, Juan, too, was offered parole. He expressed gratitude for the offer, but refused to accept it. He told the parole officer he could not leave the prison because his brother would have had no means to communicate, and would have been unable to complete the classroom education that he had begun behind bars. Juan accepted another five years of imprisonment so he could help his brother. Juan’s story is an eloquent testimony to the price of love. |
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