“As Christ Loved Us”
Romans 5.5b-11; Psalm 145.8-22; John 15.12-17
The theme of our Lenten services lays out the path we take in following Jesus, the direction we are led as disciples: “Walk in love.” To ‘walk,’ we were reminded last week, is more than a heart-healthy physical activity. The New Testament uses the word ‘walk’ to describe how we live our lives. As followers of Jesus, we don’t just ‘talk the talk,’ we ‘walk the walk.’ We follow where Jesus has led the way. The letter of 1st John says we, “ought to walk just as Jesus walked.” And so, we walk in love.
Tonight, we take the next step along the path. “Walk in love as Christ loved us.” As Christ loved us. Two letters in that sentence make all the difference: ‘as.’ As Christ loved us. We don’t live a life of faith, we don’t seek to serve the good of others, in order to try and persuade Christ to love us. No, grace is always first. “In this is love,” says the letter of 1st John, “not that we loved God, but that God loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” The path of love we take is a response to Christ who first loved, a response to seeing how much Christ has loved us and comes to us in love.
The assurance that the love of God is always first is witnessed to and declared throughout the Bible, both Old Testament and New. The book of Deuteronomy reminds the Israelites that the source of their life and love is God. “The LORD did not set affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples.” God didn’t love them because they’d mustered up a majority of believers to be winsomely loveable, but because the nature of God to love, to love both small and great.
This is the reason for the thanks of Psalm 145, this evening’s psalm. “The Lord is loving to everyone.” And this love is with us through all of life.
The prophet of Jeremiah discovered this when God’s love steadied him during the times when he was feeling low or even wrestling with God. “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.” Love begins in, and comes from, the very being of God who is love and takes the first step in revealing love to us.
This love is seen most clearly in Jesus. “As Christ loved us” tells of the full expression of God’s love in its depth and truth. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” God’s gift of love in Jesus, especially Jesus on the cross, is the highest form of love. “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
Yet here again, love does not begin with the attractiveness or worthiness of the object of affection; love begins with God taking the first step. “While we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” Weak and ungodly. The estrangement between humankind and God is so deep that St Paul uses the word ‘enemies’ to describe human status before God. Yet this gap between God’s life and ours has been bridged not by us, but by God. “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” If we are friends of Jesus, as we are, it is because he has made us that through the cross.
This love fills us to the very depth of our being, “God’s love has been poured into our hearts,” Paul says tonight. And this love is with us through all of life, even when we find that we have stumbled in our walk of love or veered off the path before us, when circumstances lead us to doubt that we might be on the right path at all. The New Testament asks, “What will separate us from the love of God?” And the scripture’s own answer is nothing. Nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.”
“As Christ loves us” tells of God’s love for us and the depth and truth of that love filling our lives. And so we pause and give thanks—in grateful prayer and with peace and hope—for the glorious gift of receiving love “as Christ loves us.”
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