Do Catholic Chrisitans have a tendency to love Mary more than Jesus Christ?
Certainly not, no more than other sorts of Christians have a tendency to love their biological mothers more than Christ. In fact, that’s a good analogy. Catholics are thankful to Christ for Mary in a way that all Christians (Catholics included) might be thankful to Him for a good, loving, and kind biological mother, without that being seen as a sign that they love their mothers more than Christ.
Why would He give us Mary when we already have Jesus Christ?
One can see it as yet another sign of His great love for us that He wanted to share the woman that nurtured and reared Him with all of His followers, not because He is not enough, but because as His mother there can be no doubt that He loved Her in the way that it is proper for a son to love a mother…and since He loves
us, He also shares with us the things He loves, including His mother. Love shares.
Why do you love Jesus Christ?
Coming up with a “why” is difficult, since it entails a conditional love based on reasons the absence of which would lead to us not loving Him. I should think that loving Jesus (of all persons) should be entirely unconditional, at least ideally. Thus the question is not as basic as it seems at first glance.
Should we only love Jesus because He died for us? Then had His disciples no reason to love Him before He died, before they understood what He would do?
Should we only love Jesus because that is the way to salvation? Is this love or self-interest?
Should we only love Jesus because of His miracles? It would be easy to stop loving Him, then, in our modern world in which it is too often easy to mistake miracles for coincidences easily explained by science.
Should we love Jesus because of what He does for us? Such an attitude led to His crucifixion when He didn’t seem (in the eyes of Jewish thought at the time) to be delivering what a Messiah was “supposed” to. Thus such a motive makes for very fickle “love” indeed.
An unconditional love for Jesus, after all, cannot be primarily based on what He has or hasn’t done, or what He will or will not do, and such a love must be independent of whether or not He ever worked the first miracle or saved the first soul–imagine, if you will, a world where we had not fallen or, even more foreign to what we can conceive, a world where we had existed from eternity and were thus uncreated. Should we love Jesus, Son of God and God the Son, any less if such a world were our reality? If so, does that not imply that His worthiness of being loved is subjective, only relative to what we
need from Him and what He is thus able to
fulfill?
No, I suspect that there is some deep, consistent reason for loving Jesus. Perhaps it is this: He is the very embodiment of Love and all that is Lovable, quite independent of His actions or our
need for Him. If He is what I have just said, which I suspect no Christian will dispute, then loving Him is the most natural, obvious, and right response imaginable, no
matter what He has or hasn’t done. Due to the circumstances of our fallen world, we are sometimes blinded to His full nature, which is probably why we do not always love Him as perfectly as we should (else why would we
ever sin against Him?), but that nature, the very reality of Who He
is, is the only reason needed to love Him. It is completely independent of anything He does…it is about Who He
is.
Praise be to God, even thinking about that gives me an amazing feeling inside, as though I have a small taste of Heaven, however incredibly small compared to the real deal, just by
dwelling on how lovable He is! At moments like this, I wonder: How could I
not love Him?! Every time I commit a mortal sin, I perplex myself with precisely that same mystery…how indeed.
Blessings in Christ,
KindredSoul
