"Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends."  So said Jesus, Jewish Messiah and, as he constantly made clear, the son of God, on the eve of his crucifixion.  Most of us know how Jesus would, in a few short hours, demonstrate his words in tangible form by dying on a Roman cross for, as he had long proclaimed he would do, all humanity, billions and billions of people, people who had already lived and died, people who were living, people who had not yet even been born.  Most of us know that this man Jesus, God in the flesh, gave himself so that we could find eternal life, an abundant life in the present moment and, when our days draw to a close, life forevermore.  Most of us know that because Jesus died, life is more than living and dying.
      Not as many of us, however, know about Maximilian Kolbe who, in his own way, did exactly the same thing.
     Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish priest who was imprisoned at one of the most notorious of the German concentration camps, Auschwitz.  In an act of selfless sacrifice that will be remembered for many ages to come, Kolbe willingly came forward to serve the death sentence of another prisoner, one Franciszek Gajowniczek, whom he had not even met.  After two weeks of slow dehydration and starvation, Kolbe finally died when the guards injected him with carbolic acid.  Gajowniczek, who died in 1995, devoted the rest of his life to telling the world about Kolbe's incredible sacrifice.
     Kolbe surely exemplified Jesus' words.  He willingly and happily died for another human being. As did Jesus for us.  As the Christian world remembers Good Friday, that darkest yet most sacred day on the liturgical calendar, the day on which Jesus, the son of God and God in the flesh, sacrificed himself, giving everything he was for the world that he had made, all of us should therefore ask, with joy, gratitude, and astonishment:  what kind of a God would do such a thing?