This is my commandment: love one another as I have loved you. No one can have a greater love than to lay down his life for his friends. The Church celebrates honors today a modern saint, an individual whose story we should all identify with. St. Maximillian Kolbe was a Polish Franciscan friar who was imprisoned in Auschwitz during the Second World War. At the camp, he offered his life in exchange for a fellow prisoner who was about to be executed. His reason? The fellow prisoner was father to a large family, and Maximilian Kolbe told him that his death would bring devastation to his family who still depended on him. And like a storyline that we can only find in a movie, the lucky prisoner lived to tell the story.
St. Maximillian’s story is one that is worth telling over and over again. For it is a story of a man who lived in a literal way the gospel command of laying down one’s life for a friend. His act was prompted, not by an urge to put his name in history books, but rather by a genuine love for a fellow human being. He did not quote any scripture passage to support his decision. He cited a very human reason for doing what he did: the fellow prisoner had a family. St. Maximillian felt the pain the man’s family would undergo if he were to die. His friend had a responsibility that himself as a friar he didn’t have. He chose to die so that his friend could live. 
The feat that St. Maximillian Kolbe pulled is one that only few have gathered enough courage to carry out. Some of us might not even have the opportunity to make a decision such as he did. However, the one thing that we can imitate from him is the ‘humanness’ of his saintly call. Our motivation to pull a saintly ‘stunt’ should not be God or Jesus as such, but rather our brothers and sisters.