Of laying down your life for another

Just finished reading Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. A story about one man laying down his life for another set in the bloody period of the French Revolution and the reign of "Madame la Guillotine" Of course Sidney emerges as the unlikely hero of heroes worth more than anyone else in the whole story and we all cry and fall in love with him of course: can it be helped?

But the impossibility of laying down your life for another is unfathomable at best. Sidney counted his life as not worth having and laid it down for one he judged better. Towards the end he says to himself over and over the words of Jesus from John, 11:25:

"I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die."

But there is a man better than we all, who laid his life down and took it up again for the entire human race. There is no greater love...

John 15:12-16

" This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you.

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you. Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you.

Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you."

Chosen and Beloved. His father loved him and he loved us enough to lay down his life for us.

John 10:17-18

" Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment have I received of my Father."

So simple, yet so very profound and which of us can lay his life down for another or accept the life laid down for us? Praise to the Christ who so loved us and whose sacrifice for us was accepted and enough!

May 21st update: So here I am trying to read ahead on year 7 for our home-school etc. And between reading "The Scarlet Pimpernel, A Tale of Two Cities, A lecture on Liberty and it's price: Understanding the French Revolution by Prof. Donald Sutherland I have had some rather "bloody" days and weeks already. Has humanity really changed? and can the things that drive entire populations to such extreme measures of purging whatever gangrene ails them ever be eliminates? Or do we just exchange one brutality for another more subtle one? Those masaccared during the French Revolution are nowhere near those who perished at the hands of the Soviet regimes. Yet how many perish today while the worlds that can help look the other way? How many women yet have to be driven to despair for want while a rich politician lives in finery and excess? When does a human life become a means to be discarded to your end? The lessons of the French Revolution are complex and jarring; but fairness and humanity is simple-yet somehow we manage to turn enough into excess on the backs of those less fortunate, without a name or a heritage to propel them forward.

Your fellow human being could be you should you become the fellow human being. EMPATHY.

Update: June 5th...Okay, I got carried away in all the mayhem and I am now workig my way down the legend that was Napoleon Bonaparte.