Love has Come

Love Has Come (John 13:34-35; 14:15-24)

Second Sunday of Advent: Love

December 10, 2017

            One of my favorite Christmas songs, popular about 35 years ago, was “Love has Come,” by Amy Grant.  Here are the lyrics from the second verse:

If I could have a special dream
Coming true on Christmas morn'
I would want the world to see
How his father smiled when Christ was born
The greatest gift the world has known!
So come on kids, look high and low
For all the toys you've dreamed to find
But I believe you'll never know
A greater joy than Jesus' love inside[i]

And then after the chorus begins, “Love has come, for the world to know.”  The song continues from there.

            As much I love that song, I never put to it the question I’ll ask right now.  Why did love need to come?  Wasn’t love already here?  Was love missing?  Hold onto that thought.  Was love missing?  Is that why God needed to come to earth and inhabit human skin?

            Now, hear the words of Jesus in John 13.  “I give you a new commandment.”  “New” is a favorite word of the New Testament.  In Christ we become new creations.  At the end of the last book, Revelation, God promises a New Heaven and a New Earth, which is actually this earth made new, joined with Heaven made new.  It sounds lovely, inviting, but why did Jesus feels the need to give a new commandment? And why was that the commandment he felt was necessary? “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

            We’ve got a love problem.  This lack of love prompted Jesus to give this specific command as a foundation in the new age that dawned with his coming.  His so called new command was actually an old command, dating back to Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy.  When asked, on numerous occasions, what is the greatest of God’s commands, Jesus always responded the same way.  “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind.  And, love your neighbor as yourself.”  This is the core of the Christian life.  We love God with everything that is in us, with our very selves, with the fullness of our lives.  This love we give to God is seen, made manifest, in the way we love our neighbors.  And neighbor, as defined in the Bible, is anyone we meet.

            Jesus felt the need to say that because he looked around and he didn’t see God-worshippers or anyone else doing that.  Amy Grant wrote and performed a song that declared Love had come with Jesus’ arrival because she was a Jesus-follower (and still is).  Her understanding of the world was such that she believed without Jesus, this love was missing. 

            We look around and see deep pain.  The way people thought about love in Jesus’ day did not alleviate the suffering caused by disease, colonization, dehumanization of people, and poverty.  Today, there is as much pain around us as in Jesus’ day.  We have 2000 years of technological advancement, developments in medicine, intellectual development, and developments in mobility and communication.  Yet, with all that’s been achieved, we look around and see as much pain as ever.  As many people hurt now as they ever have, and this is true in wealthy nations like the United States, just as it is in poorer countries. 

            Humanity has a condition no doctor can treat, no medicine can cure, and no technology can fix.  Each of us commits our individual sins.  Each one us in our own way is an agent of pain through our sinfulness.  That’s not all we are.  We are also each made in the image of God, each one very good, as it says in Genesis 1.  But because we have free will, we sin.  We willingly turn from God.  The condition of sin plagues humanity and all of creation. 

            There are many results of the sin condition.  The sin condition bears fruit.  One example is divorce.  A divorce is a death, the death of a relationship in which both participants originally vowed to stay together “until death parted them.”  Then those vows are discarded and the divorce happens.  And the insidiousness of sin leads our society to say it’s no big deal, not even a bad thing. 

Another condition is sexual confusion and sex scandals.  We treat sex casually, ignoring God’s boundaries, which are in place to keep sex healthy and beautiful and tied to a relationship of love.  The idea that one would keep himself or herself and wait for marriage is seen as quaint, childish, or old-fashioned.  Society giggles at the thought that one would actually submit to scripture as a guide for sexuality.  This is another result of the condition of sin.

Poverty is another result.  People living empty lives, void of meaning and utterly lacking in direction is another reality produced by our sinful condition.  We could keep listing things.  The human body gets a virus and symptoms break out: aches and pains, a rash, nausea, a runny nose.  The world has contracted sin as a sickness and broken relationships, toxic sexuality, violence, poverty, and emptiness are some of the symptoms, the results of our condition.

Our ideas about what love is aren’t helping.  Love as a feeling can’t be trusted.  I don’t mean to say that feelings are bad.  I love it when I feel love for my family.  There’s nothing better than being in love.  But, let me tell if you haven’t ever been married, there are days when you feel a lot of things other than love.  It doesn’t mean you bail out.  I hear of people getting divorced because they’re “not in love anymore.”  Love isn’t something you go into or come out of, it is something that’s in you.  It’s something you give, even when you don’t feel it.  Feelings are real, but they can’t be the only thing that drives us or even the first thing.

Love as a feeling doesn’t help with the pain that sin has imposed on the world.  Neither does love as romance.  I’m a big fan of sappy love songs.  I enjoy the way they make me feel, especially the ones from Broadway musicals like Phantom of the Opera.  But I know that romance, as fantastic as it can be, is fleeting.  Starry-eyed love does not heal the world’s pain.  Even the few people who are lucky to live the fairytale ending have to wake the next day and live that day under the condition of sin. 

God saw the world as it is and continues to see the world as it is.  God’s response was to take on flesh and walk among us.  God knew sin was too powerful and we could not overcome it.  So, in Jesus God came.  Here’s how Amy Grant thinks about in her Christmas song:

Love has come
For the world to know
As the wise men knew
Such a long time ago
And I believe that angels sang
That hope had begun
When the god of glory
Who is full of mercy
Yes, the god of glory
Sent his son

            Chris Tomlin, in his Christmas song “Noel,” sets this love God showed in Jesus in theological categories.  The opening lines are “Love incarnate, love divine.”  “Love divine,” is Godly love – love that human beings are incapable of producing.  We could work on developing our society for another 2000 years and we’d be no closer to divine love.  We have to depend on God for it, and we desperately need it to fully be what we were created to be – God’s image bearers.

            “Love incarnate” means this Godly love is here.  Incarnation is the idea of being completely and permanently present.  When Jesus is referred to as the incarnation of God, we are declaring that God walked among us as a human being.  Jesus was not God disguised as a human.  Jesus emptied himself of his divinity, Paul says in Philippians 2.  He never stopped being God, but he emptied himself to the point that he was fully human.  He was fully present.  To sing “Love incarnate, love divine” as Advent worship is to insist that Jesus is love and in Jesus, God’s love is fully with us.

            The love is seen in Jesus’ interactions with people like blind beggars, outcast tax collectors, poor gentiles, scandalized prostitutes, and uneducated peasant fishermen.  All were welcomed.   The love is in all of Jesus’ teaching.  And ultimately, it is expressed in his sacrificial death for us.  How do we live into this love?

            In John 14, he tells the disciples and tells us today, “If you love me you will keep my commandments” (v.15).  The verb “keep” has several connotations.  In saying, “keep my commandments,” Jesus tells us to pay attention.  The commands are “love God” and “love neighbor.”  So, we have to pay attention to God’s constant presence, and to the needs of hurting people around us.  We live into the love that has come by being attentive to people and to God.

            A second connotation is “observe.”  We love God by worshiping Him.  Our observance happens in our participation with the church in the singing of worship songs, communal prayer, and communal engagement with the Word of God.  We live into the love that has come by living lives of worship.

            A third connotation of the word “keep,” as in “keep my commandments” is fulfill.  Jesus’ will is done, his word fulfilled, when we extend ourselves to help others.  To whom will you show special kindness?  What hurting person will be blessed because you decided to give of yourself?  When we sacrifice our time, our resources, and our hearts on behalf of others, then the world begins to experience divine love.  The shallow, fleeting expressions of love that don’t help the world’s pain are eclipsed by the God love that lives in us and pours out of us because we have turned to Christ. 

            Divine love is not a feeling or sentiment, but a choice and action.  We can only live in this divine love with God’s help and Jesus also knew this.  So, in the same speech, John 14:16, he promises, “I will ask the Father, and he will give you the Advocate to be with you forever.”  The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, God the Comforter, is with us, helping us see the love of God in real ways in our lives. 

            The world is in pain.  Maybe you know your own specific version of that pain.  Have no fear.  The Christmas story is that love has come in Jesus Christ.  We can know that love, live in that love, and draw other hurting people into that love of God.  It begins as we turn fully to Him.  Love has come.  Receive it by giving your heart to the Lord today.

AMEN  

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[i] Songwriters: Amy Grant Gill / John Shane Keister / Michael Whitaker Smith

Love Has Come lyrics © Warner/Chappell Music, Inc, Capitol Christian Music Group