Before this morning, I never realized that 1 John is as much about sin as it is about love--perhaps even more. I am awestruck by this connection as I consider the difference between what I might call the two extreme views of the gospel of Jesus Christ. All love and forgiveness, no sin and repentance. Or all sin and repentance, no love and forgiveness. Never have I seen a clearer balance than I found in 1 John.
The reason John warns his brothers and sisters to stay away from sin is not because he wants to hang punishments over their heads...it is because he loves them. The reason John's heart overflows with love for them is not because they are perfect...it is because they are fundamentally flawed by sin and forgiven through the blood of His Savior. Is this not a reflection of Christ...a representation of how He sees us and the nature of His unconditional love for us?
What does it mean to touch the untouchable? To love the unlovable? To reach the unreachable? I think it means more than we think it does. I don't think it just means to meet the needs of the poor and underfed, to hug those in need of love and affection, or to reach for the underdog in society. No. I think it means to go exactly where no one else wants to go.
What does the Lord mean when He tells us to offer forgiveness 7x70 times? What is the Lord trying to say when He loves Israel with an undying love after her constant sins of idol worship, unbelief, and blatant immorality? It's the same thing...go exactly where no one else wants to go.
"Hosea, go love a woman who won't love you back. Love a woman who will love men who hurt her more than she will love the man who would protect her and provide for her. Moses, go love a people who will turn their back on you whenever it is convenient for them. Abraham, go kill your only son on an altar. Kill the promise I've given you without asking me why. Joseph, go speak to your brothers who sold you and wanted you dead. Feed them and provide homes for them, though they wanted to leave you with not even your life. And Jonah, go tell the Ninevites to leave their sin so I can forgive them and bless them. Go even though they hate you"....I could keep going. Over and over, God asks his people, his messengers and disciples, to go where it makes no sense. To step into a role that often hurts. Because God goes where no one else will go.
He is radical. He is not defined by any adjective or confined by any exclusive definition. He does what He wants, He does it for our best, and He does it in ways that He doesn't have to explain.
I've been wondering lately what it really means to love like He loves. To give like He gives and see like He sees. So little of my life experience has forced me to love what hurts me...to even reach out and hold a hand that stabbed me in the back or slapped me in the face. But I want to know...How would it feel to love a murderer? A murderer who takes lives brutally, devastates families and towns and nations with no apparent reason? How would it feel to love a mistress? One who steals the love of a man from his wife, destroys a family for her own selfishness? How would it feel to love a thief? A thief who stole everything that another worked for, leaving his home of memories an empty shell and his family's future a seemingly hopeless blank? How would it feel to love a fallen leader? One who seemed to offer truth and comfort and safety but is found to be full of lies and deception?...
The truth is..I don't know. With this sinful and broken heart of mine, I don't think I can or ever will know. I find it difficult some days just to love and honor even those priceless hearts who mean the very most to me. But God knows...He knows exactly how it feels. Because He feels it every moment...every second, His heart throbs with compassion for sinners who I, in my human pride, would reject with disgust. Every moment His whole being surges with passionate love for the thief, the terrorist...even the traitor! The ones no one wants. The ones we are warned about. The ones even the Church would have us avoid or keep at a distance..
So I ask you, what would it cost us to love like He loves? Even just for one day...to go into the neighborhoods no one else wants to set foot in, to have lunch with the person everyone else gossips about, to shamelessly love those who can't return love as we would have them return it. Would it cost us our health, our lives, our pride, our position?
But, the bigger question is this: what will it cost us not to love like He loves? Every day we're alive, doesn't the bitterness at our fellow human failures eat at our souls? Isn't a great source of our own pain the inability to forgive one who has caused it? Even I feel that..I in my brief and largely sheltered life experience. I feel that when I wake up from dreams that ask me to enter a part of my past that hurts too much--to face that small, persistent, nagging fear of insufficiency and desertion that I want to deny is there. I feel that when I swear inwardly at the woman who cuts me in line, at the child who yells obscenities to his buddies on the schoolyard at my workplace...I feel that when I look around at my fellow brothers and sisters and ask why they seem to have it all together and I am falling apart. Pain is not the problem...pride is. So, how would it feel to let it go and become the untouchable? To take off the mask and break down the walls and fall down in the dust where we came from? God only uses us when we know who we are...sinners wrecked and ruined by evil who live only by the breath He gives us each moment. Sinners who can only offer love in even the smallest of measures because He gave ALL of His love to us in the person of Jesus Christ. In the dust, we are human..and we live only by the breath of God which gives us life.
So, how would it feel? How would it feel to just go where He leads us without asking questions or demanding answers? How would it feel to love through the pain, the anger, the shame, and the stigma...to love how He loves?
