Love and Blisters

1 John 4:20-21

The love of God has dirt under its fingernails.  Contrary to popular opinion, love, properly understood, is not an ephemeral emotion floating in the atmosphere just above treeline.  Christian love builds callouses on its fingers and feet.  Love does things.  It motivates us, teaches us what is good and what is destructive for the the human life.  It is - or it becomes - the love of God among us.

John is thoroughly earthy in his commands to love.  Though he talks about love a lot he is far from what we would call a romantic.  Christian love is intensely practical, intentional, and often difficult.  If we say we love God and hate a neighbor we are lying about loving God.  It doesn't matter how often we say we love God, how sincerely we mean it when we say it, or how many people believe us when we say it, if we hate a single human soul we are lying about our love for God.  It is a high bar, but the love of God is utterly incompatible with hatred for people.  In fact, the more we grow in the love of God the clearer love and hate become to us: we love people and hate the junk that destroys their souls.  We learn to hate sin just as God does.  In fact, God loves every soul so much, he deeply hates the sin that separates them from him and destroys their lives.

Every human deserves to know the love of God and Christians need to do the loving.  This world with all its promises of liberty and tolerance will never reproduce the power of the love of God, so it needs to be the people of God who show it.  People need to be loved.

These people we live with, get to know, build relationships with, all need to be loved.  The people we create families and communities with, the people who become our life-long friends need to be loved.  Even those who take more from us that they give need God's love.  The people we find difficult, annoying, arrogant, simple-minded, myopic, dangerous, or plain-old cruel need to be loved.

After all, this is how God did it.

Instead of loving us from afar and casting his affections our way hoping we might feel some of it or comprehend some fraction of it, he came here.  He became flesh and the life and love of God was manifest in our midst in a man who got dirt under his fingernails and blisters on his feet.  He walked the dusty roads of Galilee, feasted with friends and laughed in the company of people who befriended him.  He wept at the death of a friend.  He endured the fickle crowds who followed him as long as he had bread to give them at the end of the sermon.  He endured the years-long persecution of the religious leadership of his people.  His friends ran from his aid, denied, and betrayed him.  In this flesh he felt every ounce of pain in the flogging and the hammering of the nails.  In this flesh, the love of God died to save difficult, rebellious, stiff-necked, dangerous, and plain-old evil people.

We need to love people.  God did.

For Christ Did Not Please Himself

Romans 15:1-3

Christians come in every possible variation, color, and background.  And when we come together as the church we are intended to leave all the non-essentials at the door and live in unity under Christ.  At least that is the ideal.  It is how God is constructing his church, but we, the bricks of that construction, often get in the way.  Our differences divide us too easily.  We may gather in a vague sense of the supremacy and Lordship of Christ, but we are often far more taken with our pew-mate’s difference of opinion on the color of the pews than with our mutual Savior.  Our pettiness ought not be.  It should not be the thing that defines the body of Christ.  Instead, Christ shows us a much more excellent way.

“We who are strong have an obligation.”

Among our differences, Christians come in all degrees of maturity of lifestyle and faith.  Some have found a deep sense of intimacy with Christ and a strong understanding of their life of liberty and God-honoring behavior.  Others are still young or relatively immature in the faith and stumble easily at the lives and opinions of others.  When Paul mentions the “strong” and the “weak” to the Romans he recognizes the reality of weakness among Christians but places an obligation on the strong.  They are obliged to bear with the failings of the weak and live so as to please them in God’s goodness instead of living to please themselves.

The mature believer views the body of Christ as an opportunity to tend to the good of their weaker brother or sister’s life in Christ, and to make an effort to build them up.  Paul’s vocabulary about building up the other believer is vivid – it means to erect an edifice, to build a house, to edify.  In this way of living with each other in Christ, the disciple continues to learn what it means to view the other as more important than themselves.  As Paul put it to the Philippians, Christ’s way of thinking was to view you as more important than himself, and we ought to think the same way.  And in a relationship where one believer learns to love the other in spite of differences over non-essentials, we learn to enter another’s life as a builder instead of a destroyer.  We can actually be a part of God’s work in their lives to raise them to maturity in Christ and intimacy with their Heavenly Father.  Isn’t that a better vision of the body of Christ than a group of grumps quibbling over meaningless legalistic jots and tittles?

“For Christ did not please himself.”

The reason for our behavior is always grounded in Christ.  In order to explain and justify this radically selfless view of harmony in the church, Paul makes the ultimate appeal for the Christ-follower – this is how Jesus actually lived.  His incarnation was for our good: he “made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:7). His life was for our good: “For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve” (Mark 10:45). His death was for our good: “he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities” (Isaiah 53:5). His resurrection was for our good: “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).  The way Christ lived his life on earth 2000 years ago has profound consequences in our lives today.  It gives us our reasons for behavior and practical grounding for our relationships.

Christ lived his life among us so that we might have his life.  Do we live with each other in the same way?  Does the life of the church mean it is easier for God’s people to find God’s life?