Love Unknown

More songs have been sung about it, and no doubt more words written, than on any other subject. Great paintings celebrate it, sculpture captures it in metal, stone or wood. Great minds have sought to explain it, some have even gone out of their minds for want of it.

Love. A four letter word, and yet the most powerful weapon in the universe.

Where does it come from? What is it anyway? Is not a better question, on this cusp between "Maundy Thursday" and "Good Friday" Where did it go?

To a kangaroo court and a timid Roman consul. To religious officials with eyes blinded to any view but their own. To a crowd shouting praises to their king a few days before on Palm Sunday, now baying for his blood. In less than 24 hours, they got it.

This is love unknown. This is the force that brings me to tears, as I write this in my loneliness this late Thursday night, with my brother away at Scout camp and my mother no longer with us. Perhaps I feel more lonely tonight than I have ever done since I was a nine year old boy longing for a friend, and to whom the Passiontide hymn of my title meant then, and still means, so much.

This is Savage bearing his soul. I hope perhaps my British, male readers will give me forebearance. We just don't tend to do things that way here. We're not supposed to show our feelings but instead keep a stiff upper lip and never betray our emotions.

Yet this is folly. Maundy Thursday was when He whose hands flung stars into space knew the absence of love, sweated and wept with worry for fear of death and want of a friend. Even his closest companions of three years, those who earlier that evening had shared the sacred family feast with him, would not stay awake with him as he anticipated the agony of what was to come. When the "authorities" came to arrest Jesus of Nazareth, they all fled. Not one, even the most professedly loyal, would follow him to his fate nor defend him in public.

The saddest fact of life is that, ultimately, we are all alone. We seek love in all its many forms throughout life, but nobody can come with us on that most painful, final of journeys.

Except one, who did- alone, deserted even by his God (his own father, in fact). He was to die the cruellest death imaginable, reserved for the most heinous of criminals.

Jesus wept. Jesus bore injustice, sorrow, desertion. This is love.

This is the reason I live, and its why I need to blog tonight. May you too know this love this holy season.

He came from His blest throne
Salvation to bestow;
But men made strange, and none
The longed for Christ would know:
But O! my Friend, my Friend indeed,
Who at my need His life did spend.