By Such Stripes Are We Healed
by Jack Shaver
©The United Church of Canada, 1985
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 0-88622-196-X
7M/12/85/APL
Used with Permission
Monday
Finally, someone says it
I John 4: 7-21
In this last week of Lent before Holy Week our readings come from the epistles that are left, after we exclude those everyone agrees Paul wrote. But I did not intend this to be a meaningful classification. After dividing the weeks of Lent between a number of biblical writers, I had a week left over and these writers left over. They are all significant writers, but there is no significance to my lumping them together.
In this First Epistle of John, a Christian writer finally says it. God is love. What else were those exilic prophets working around to? What was more central to John 's Gospel with his lines "God so loved the world" and "By this you shall be known as my disciples, if you love one another"? What else inspired the writer of all those angry and boastful words to the Corinthians to write also chapter 13 of the first epistle? It is what all the preaching and teaching is about. It is what all the stories are about, all the words like righteousness, justification, reconciliation, dying and rising. It is what the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are about. It is what the gift of the Holy Spirit is all about. And now someone finally says it. God is love.
- Again, I want to share how ironical I find it that the occasion of the revelation "God is love" is revealed in the death of one Who suffered unjustly!
- In this the love of God was manifest among us in that God sent his son into the world so that we might live through him.
- Yet what else could be the window through which we see God's love?
If God is love, then all the glory and majesty and might and power of God must be standing against unlove. Yet, if God is love, then all that is unloving must be within God's embrace. How can anything be that much against, and that much for, the same thing at the same time? The Bible is not talking about mush when it says "God is love". It is talking about something fierce and tender at the same time. That total a love must be doing something like bearing its own wrath. That's why you get to behold it only in a crucified one.
The Gospel is all in that sentence, "God is love." It's another way of telling the radical good news.
What else lights up life? What else makes travail exalting? What else blesses grief? What else can turn the burden of sin-bearing into an easy yoke? Most of us have had an experience of love making all thing new.
But we also have abundant experience of the pain of love turning us off and the wounds of love hardening our hearts. We have used love to manipulate others and have been manipulated by others in the name of love. That is to say, if love was just a new requirement that promised to make us alive, we would be of all creatures most miserable. If what was to put us right was the law of love, then we have been given more bad news. However,- In this is love, not that we loved God, but that God loved us.
- It is because God loves us that the splendour of love is good news.
Praise
Almighty God,
It is good to have all the majesty and power and dominion and praise where it belongs.
No end of trouble is ours when we dread the wrong things, when we hold in honour that which is not worthy.
No end of disasters follow when we tremble before powers that cannot harm us.
All fails us when we trust that which cannot save us.
All honour and praise, O God, are for you alone.
Only your reconciling righteousness has just claim to our zeal.
Only a steadfast love of the world is fit ruler for the human heart.
Only the light that lightens everyone is fit light of the world.
No glory is more glorious than the love that bears sinners.
Worthy is the lamb who was slain to receive power and wealth, wisdom and might and honour and glory and blessing.
Amen