Sacrificial Love

by Tom Moore

In Charles Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities, the climax came when a family was in deep trouble. The husband was about to be executed during the Reign of Terror in Paris, and the man who loved the hero’s wife had the strange gift of being virtually identical in appearance to the condemned man. Had the hero died, perhaps this character would have had the opportunity to court the dead man’s wife. Instead, he substituted himself for the hero, through trickery, thus becoming the hero himself. He went to the guillotine and died in place of the other with the words, “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.”

In this bit of fiction one sees the sort of love that is not self-interested but is self-giving.

This is the kind of self-giving love that our Lord had for us. The apostle Paul writes, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (Jn. 15:13). What about us? What kind of self-giving love are we willing to manifest to one another?