Finding Love

There is a story of God’s love for the world that I would like to tell. But it is not easily told. Love requires that everything come out into the open, that everything be what it is. Love must come from the centre of a person and go to the centre of another person.

In many ways, we steel ourselves against the simple things, the true things, the lasting things, and have a preference for the immediate things, the complex things, the things that have to be done again or improved on because what we have is not real. We may show respect, loyalty, tolerance or give people what they want but still not have love. We may indulge a passion and still not have love.

Many things we do are helpful but not love, kind but still not love, useful or interesting or stimulating but not love. In particular, we try to stay in charge, but love involves giving ourselves away and this is risky.

There are obstacles to love flowing freely. Things have happened to us. We had to cope. We sought refuge behind talking, or listening, or making things, or doing things, or going places, or succeeding, or providing. But to do these things, we left something of ourselves behind—some unfinished business, something that couldn’t come out into the open. So, we moved forward—but not every part of us. There was a division, a severing of what was real from what we projected.

Cleverness may tell us what things are and how they work and if they can be changed. But only love can tell us who we are, and why.

God is love. This is our ‘problem’. God is love and he created us in an outpouring of himself. He is always our origin and goal, our centre, and, most significantly for us, the word by which to live. If he does not speak to us, we are effectively orphans—without a true home in this life or the next.

God himself is the love that makes us human. He does not have a ‘use by’ date, or go out of fashion, or wear out or become redundant. If we do not want to have God in our thinking, we live in death rather than life—we leave something of ourselves behind.

The pain of being a human being is very real. Those who do not feel it have decided that it is easier to live with the image they have become, or the dreams that may yet come true, or the best of what has now gone, or the imagining of what might have been.

But what is this pain? And why is it easier to move away from it than face it? Are we destined to be forever moving away from our centre rather than be moving out into life—wholly at rest with ourselves and our Creator—and giving to others from who we really are?

The story of God’s love begins with him creating us and giving us this world as our home. But it becomes clearest when Jesus Christ comes to share our history. When we say that God is love, it is his Son that we have in mind. We do not think of our pleasant or unpleasant experiences, or the ideas of God we have formed, or the prayers that have been answered, but very simply, of Christ.

To tell the story of God’s love is more than hard; it is miraculous. It must be told by Jesus Christ, in his own words and actions. And he can only tell it fully by laying down his life.

We must listen to Jesus Christ because God gave—and gives him to us. There is nothing greater that God could give. Life itself is a gift. To breathe and to know that God formed us is beyond telling. But he has given us his own Son—his very self really, because all of his love is focused on this Son. To give us his Son is to give us all he has.

What is remarkable is that the Son of God does not speak to the image we make for ourselves. He speaks to us. He knows our severed self and speaks God’s words. He speaks what his Father wants to say. What we hear comes from his fellowship with the Father. He speaks words that heal, so that we know our fractured life is not all there is. His words are not designed to shut us out.

Strangely, it is when he is crucified that we see ourselves more clearly than when we look at ourselves. Christ’s loving deed has encompassed us in our strange and mis-formed ways. He is there for us. But he is there, for us, in the presence of God—bearing God’s rejection of all that we have become. He is there before God, doing what he is doing for God. And he is received by God. We know this because God raises him from the dead to tell us that we are reconciled to him.

This Son is able to reveal God’s love to us. That is, he is able to say it, to be it, to convey it to us. He has never shut himself away from the love of his Father, has never needed to hide from what he is. He has received in full what his Father is and knows fully what his Father is about in the world. What he knows is that his Father is for us—though against what we have made of ourselves apart from him.

Now, we may come out of hiding. God has not only raised Jesus from the dead but recreated our broken humanity. He suffered for us in our brokenness so that we could join him in his wholeness—before his Father, God.

This is not just our new life but our true life. If we hear the word that God speaks through him, and trust him, we are children of God. We have been healed.

Through Christ now, we can change our view of everything. The place to find love is not by getting closer to ourselves or another person or our interests. Our own true self is here—in Christ, on the cross, and raised from the dead. This is the way of God for every human being—the way of love. From here, we know who we are, and we know that, like Christ, our life is for others.