"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.  As we enter into the most solemn days of the Christian calendar, we think of these words again and how they speak to all of us.
     Very few of us, however, will ever have opportunity to live out these words in a literal way.  Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish priest who was imprisoned at the German concentration camp 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.  As the Christian world remembers Good Friday, that darkest yet most sacred of days, the day on which Jesus, 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?
     The answer is very simple:  a God who loves us.