A wedding, surgery and the way Jesus loves

I’m getting ready tonight for Matthew and Miranda’s wedding tomorrow morning. As always, I’m struck with the weight of the words these two are about to utter in public and the sort of love captured there – a deeply sacrificial love that rises to the heights, plumbs the depths and applies to everything in between – a love Michelle and I committed to 13 years ago. Its the sort of love Jesus has for us. Here is a great passage from Kent Hughes to illustrate it:

Dr Richard Selzer tells of performing surgery to remove a tumor and of necessity severing a facial nerve, leaving a young woman’s mouth permanently twisted in palsy: ‘Her young husband is in the room. He stands on the opposite side of the bed, and together they seem to do well in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, private. Who are they, I ask myself, he and this wry-mouth I have made, who gaze at and touch each other so generously, greedily. The young woman speaks. “Will my mouth always be like this?” she asks. “Yes, it will. It is because the nerve was cut.” She nods and is silent. But the young man smiles. “I like it,” he says. “It’s kind of cute.”….Unmindful, he bends to kiss the crooked mouth, and I, so close, can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works.”[i] 

Here is a husband’s sacrificial love in the face of permanent disfigurement. In a more profound way, Jesus has bent down to you and me and gone to that permanently scarring place, the cross, because he loves us so much. The things that others would turn away from, he confronts head on.