This Is Love
“Truly he taught us to love one another. His law is love, and his gospel is peace.” These are some of my favorite words found in one of my favorite songs this time of year, “O Holy Night.” Just the other night I softly sang these words to my daughter, Hattie, as I rocked her before she went to sleep. I sang them to her again when she awoke unexpectedly at 3:30 the next morning.
There is something so moving about the words of that beautiful song. They are a reminder that on one holy night everything changed because Jesus Christ came to be among us. He was the embodiment of God’s love for us. Everything he did taught us of God’s love for us, and the love that we must have for each other.
God is love, we say. Nowhere is that clearer than on Christmas Eve when we gather with our families in our homes and in the church sanctuary. We tell stories. We read scriptures. We sing carols. We light candles. We come forward to take communion and celebrate a meal Christ offered his disciples. We hug family and friends we haven’t seen all year, and we greet each other with joy. Through all of it we remember that in Jesus Christ the love of God put on flesh and lived among us.
The love of God seen in Jesus has the power to move us beyond anything else. We cannot possibly encounter it and remain unchanged. It compels us to respond. It isn’t enough to feel God’s love and simply sit with it as it embraces us. We also must allow it to change us and move us to change the way we treat each other.
Christ taught us that the greatest requirement of this life is to love. We must love one another in good times and bad. We must love one another even when it is hard. We must love one another even when the other person seems unlovable. We must love one another even when we feel unlovable. Why? Because at Christmas we remember that God first loved us and loved us enough to send Jesus.
The truly good news is that God’s love didn’t stop at the manger. It moved into the wilderness of temptation. It moved to the roadside of the lepers and the blind beggars. It moved to the Temple of the religious elite. It moved to the homes of the sick and hurting. It moved to the hillside where 5,000 were fed. It moved to the well of the scorned Samaritan woman. It moved to the tomb of Lazarus. It moved all the way to the cross.
I once heard of a nativity scene that was set up among the other Christmas decorations in a neighborhood in Atlanta. What made this particular scene interesting was that standing behind it was a much larger cross. It so tall, that it could be easily seen over the stable and the star. Even more interesting, if you passed that scene at the right time of day as the sun was going down, the cross cast a shadow that fell directly over the manger where the Baby Jesus lay.
The cross always looms over the manger. The road out of the manger and the stable always leads to the cross. We cannot fully comprehend the love of God in a baby born in Bethlehem until we come to grips with the man nailed to the cross on Golgotha. But just like the manger was only the beginning, the cross was not the end. The cross always leads to the endless hope of the empty tomb, and the sending of the Holy Spirit to fill us and work in the world among us even today.
There are many ways to look at who Jesus is, particularly this time of year. Since most of us have in our minds a son born to two starry-eyed, sleep deprived parents, many of us probably think of the most famous verse in all of Holy Scripture when it says in John 3:16 that “God loved the world so much that God sent God’s only Son, that whoever believes in him would not perish, but have eternal life.” And in a Trinitarian sense that works. God sent Jesus. God the Father sent God the Son. God the Creator sent God the Redeemer. But to truly grasp who Jesus is, I always have to remember that in the face of Jesus, in the face of the baby in the manger, we see the very face of God.
In the baby in Bethlehem we witness the Incarnation. In Jesus of Nazareth we see God in the flesh. We see the God who loved the world enough to come and be part of it, to experience it for all of its faults and failures, to identify with everything that we have to go through so that we would know that we never walk alone, and then to overcome it all so that we would know that there is always hope, that there is always something better that is coming our way because God is always at work in the world. And God loved us so much that God came and was willing to lay God’s own life down for the sake of the world.
What does love look like? Jesus said it himself. “Greater love has no one than to lay down one’s life for a friend.” God loved us enough to come to be with us, and to lay down God’s own life for us. Could God really expect anything less of us than to lay down our lives for those around us each day? Isn’t that what the love of a Christ-follower looks like?
Love of this kind requires action from us We have to do something. It requires us to spend each day trying to be a little more loving than we were the day before. It requires us to choose love of God and love of neighbor as the defining aspects of our lives. It requires us to teach others about the love that we were taught by God through Jesus.
Frederick Buechner said, “Of all powers, love is the most powerful and the most powerless. It is the most powerful because it alone can conquer that final and most impregnable stronghold which is the human heart. It is the most powerless because it can do nothing except by consent.”
“In the Christian sense,” he said, “love is not primarily an emotion but an act of the will. When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling…On the contrary, he is telling us to love our neighbors in the sense of being willing to work for their well-being even if it means sacrificing our own well-being to that end.”*
That’s the love we saw in Jesus. The question is whether or not others can see it in us as well. How will you be a little more loving to those around you today and in the days to come?
* Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, San Francisco: Harper, 1973. http://www.frederickbuechner.com/quote-of-the-day/2017/9/10/love?rq=love.