Love That Can’t Be Budgeted

What do Jesus and Kitchen Aid mixers have in common? They hum a very harmonious tune in my ears. More on this in a moment.

Our calendars and all of history recognize this moment. We define our years both past and future in reference to this day. The day that a perfectly moral man named Jesus died, the worst death that humanity could invent for itself. History tells us that Rome reserved crucifixion for only the worst kinds of people, and it is said that people would request to be burned alive rather than be crucified because of the prolonged agony that it would cause. Some of the worst crucifixions kept a victim suspended in the air, hanging between both heaven and earth, and between life and death, for up to three days. It was the most unimaginable way to die.

My entire existence has been organized and orchestrated around this event, whether I have realized it or not. And over two thousand years later, we’re still talking about it, and for good reason.

So if Jesus is God’s son (and He is), why would he allow this to happen to himself? If God came down to save us, why doesn’t he just snatch us up and avoid all of the pain and forsakenness that a crucifixion has to offer? Why not just snap his fingers and be done with it?

The short answer is this. The cross is not the easy way out. Any compelling act of love is expensive and costs the Giver a great deal of value, whether that is monetary value, vulnerable expression, or direct effort; the best kind of love is costly.

It’s Valentine’s Day, February 7th, 2013, and I have all but $350 to my name. I had just driven from California to Utah with my girlfriend from ministry school to visit her family in Utah for the first time. If you know my wife, Lydia (yes, my now wife…young adult men take notes right now), you know that she’s one of the best home cooks there is and finds so much joy in baking and cooking meals for our friends and family from scratch. At the time, she had always wanted a Kitchen Aid mixer of her own. We had been walking through a store one day, and as any girl does, she rattles off the details of her dream kitchen, with this mixer being at the top of that list. And as any good boyfriend who hopes to be a husband one day, you open up your iPhone notes app and write it down so you don’t forget.

You know the kind of Kitchen Aid mixer I’m talking about. It’s the same one your mom, aunt, and grandma have had for longer than you’ve been alive because they all have a lifetime warranty. I’m convinced that when people use the expression “they don’t make things like they used to,” what they are actually referring to is Kitchen Aid mixers. Lydia dreamed of having her own Kitchen Aid mixer that she could someday use to cook meals for her children. So I did what any good, responsible boyfriend does. I went to Macy’s, drained my bank account, and I bought her that $250 bright red Kitchen Aid mixer for Valentine’s Day, not considering that I still needed gas money to make it back to California. It was expensive. Was this a financially smart decision? Probably not. Do I regret it? Ask the Kitchen Aid sitting on my counter today.

Long story short, I didn’t need to buy Lydia a ring to tell her I wanted to marry her. The Kitchen Aid said it all. The point is, sometimes the cost of love looks irresponsible to everyone else watching. I’m sure my parents were thinking, “What’s this starry-eyed kid of ours thinking, spending so much on a kitchen appliance…”. Yet within the heart of the giver of the gift, there is a furious tornado of passionate, drunken love that can not be reasoned with or talked down; it can only be utterly expressed at the cost of the gift.

At the cross, God refuses to give a calculated budgeted gift. He drains Heaven’s account, selling all of the stock and value that make up the entire existence of the cosmos. Jesus is not just a rescue mission (He is that too), He is love on the move, displaying the full force of the Trinity’s desire for creation to thrive and live married to God.

At Calvary, Jesus is not dying for no reason. He’s cashing in on the greatest display of love he can possibly present to every single one of us. He’s affectionately parading around his costly, expensive, spare-no-expense love. In rescuing us at a high price, we see why Jesus isn’t interested in saving himself from pain; He’s interested in rescuing us out of ours.

There in 33 AD, God in human flesh marches up Calvary to be crucified, not making war with Rome, Herod, or Caiaphas and his gang of Sadducees and Pharisees. Jesus is drawing all of the world’s evil into one location at one point in time. He is covertly luring death, sin, evil, and the devil, which all make up what we call “The Serpent,” into a trap, and the trap is His body and blood. God is catching Evil napping, and he purposely wakes it to experience all of the munitions Evil intended for us. Put another way, Jesus is luring the fire and full weight of the highest evil in Israel, the highest evil in the western world, and the highest evil in the hearts of men, and the full brunt of Satan’s evil all at once as he allows them to do their worst to him by spending all of their weaponry upon his flesh and not ours.

The greatest religion ever known (Judaism) and the finest system of justice the world had ever come up with (Rome) at the time came together, and they killed God dressed in humanity’s clothes. At first glance, it appears Jesus is dying for no reason when in reality Jesus is snatching the serpent (satan, evil, death, and sin) and plunging himself and the serpent into the abyss of forsakenness. What is actually happening is the shepherd is allowing the wolves to feed on his flesh until they are poisoned by his very righteousness.

Any god can disassociate himself/herself from the fall of a mere mortal. But Jesus wraps Himself in the clothe of mortality, dives headfirst into the abyss, lays his life down, kills death along with Himself, and then dusts himself off as he picks his life back up and walks out the other side. And who is he coming out the other side to? You. Me. Everyone you know. God dies clothed in humanity, so that humanity can live being clothed in God.

This love is a spare-no-expense kind of love. It’s illogical. It doesn’t make sense. But it makes sense to God because He’s very much in love with us. Human reason can’t get a grip on it. But this is how God shows us the great lengths to which he will go in order to show us the great worth of fellowship with him. The price to have you and me know that we are dearly loved is worth it all to him.

Brennan Manning once said in his book Abba’s Child, “Everything I am is grace, that on my own I cannot receive it, for even receiving it is a gift —the grace to grasp grace IS grace.”