The Urgency of Love

Love covers a multitude of sins. We met this grace saturated phrase this week in the portion from 1 Peter that we took up in our liturgy. Love is often given a place of priority in the lists of virtues that appear in the New Testament. In 1 Corinthians, love is personified as the virtue without which nothing else is meaningful; in Colossians 3, Paul instructs the Christians to "above all, clothe yourselves with love which binds everything together in perfect harmony". It is difficult to know exactly what Peter means when he says that above all maintain constant love for one another because love covers a multitude of sins but I think we can get a picture of it when we consider that love defines uniquely God's motivation in relationships. In order to get at least a little bit of what Peter has in mind when he says that love covers a multitude of sins we need to move past two common misunderstandings related to how we view God's love at work in the world through the gospel.


Misunderstanding One: God's love is defined by his justice. Not so. The gospel arises out of God's love - not because of the logic of a schema devised to satisfy his justice but because of a heart set upon reconciling women and men to himself (Romans 5:8). God's goal for new creation is not a world where the scales are balanced but a world where justice is transcended. Miroslav Volf's quote is helpful here: "Justice demands nothing less than the undoing of the world, past and present, and the creation of a new world.... A world of perfect justice is a world of love. It is a world with no rules in which everyone does what he or she pleases and all are pleased by what everyone else does; a world of no rights because there are no wrongs from which to be protected; a world of no legitimate entitlements because everything is given and nothing withheld... a world with no equality because all differences are loved in their own appropriate way; a world in which desert plays no role because all actions stem from superabundant grace. In short, a world of perfect justice would be a world of transcended justice because it would be a world of perfect freedom and love. The blindfold would be taken from the eyes of Lady Justice and she would delight in whatever she saw; she would lay aside the scales because she would not need to weigh or compare anything; she would drop her sword because there would be nothing to police.... If we see human beings as children of the one God, created by God to belong all together as a community of love, then there will be good reasons to let embrace - love - define what justice is."


Misunderstanding Two: Rules make-up the basis of our relationship with God. The story of the prodigal son corrects this understanding by showing us, quite dramatically, that love - not rules - forms the basis of our relationship with God (his tireless love for us). The father in this story never lets go of his relationship with the son who leaves and brings shame upon himself and his family. The son broke the rules and imagined that the relationship was lost as he indicated by devising a way to come back to his father's homes as a hired hand. But the father's "eyes that searched for and finally caught sight of the son in the 'distance' tell of a heart that was with the son in the 'distant country'... the father kept the son in his heart as an absence shaped by the memory of the former presence (Volf)".


We are left, however, with the question of what it looks like for love to cover a multitude of sins. Jesus gives us quite a few portraits of what this looks like. Let's take one, for example - one that we looked at recently in a slightly different context (see homily recap entitled, Good News for a Sex Saturated Culture). In John 4, Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well. It is clear from his interaction with her that he is driven by self-giving love and a desire to be in a life-giving relationship with her. Her life had been messy for sure. Like most of us, it is not unreasonable to imagine that her life was in the condition it was in because of her sins and the sins of others. Her confession: "I have no husband" is met with Jesus' acknowledgment of her brokenness and an invitation to see, in him, a future of worshipping God in spirit and in truth. There is not a hint of moralism in Jesus' words. Instead there an inviation for her to grow in the gospel. The implication is clear; the way to human flourishing for her, and for us, is found in a deeper relationship with God and his healing love. The goal of God's love is to bring us to see ourselves in light of God's purposes for us in this life. To be sure, love wounds us as it opens us to the future that God wants for us - it is always hard to come to terms with the truth, at least initially. But it is in the confidence of God's love for us and his desire for us to flourish that we find the courage to face that truth and seek the healing that comes through a deeper experience of that same love.


1. When you are angry or cross with someone over something they have done or left undone that has hurt you - how do you set out to let them know about it? In your confrontation do you make it clear that you love them and care for them, or do you set them up for failure by escalating the tension with words that are not grounded in love?


2. Can you think of an occasion where someone has loved you in a way that has covered a multitude of your sins? What does this look like?


3. We all know that trying harder to love isn't really helpful. What does it look like, though, to put oneself in the path of God's love more deliberately, to be more open to God's love, to clothe oneself with God's love? Can you put into your own words what this sort of active passivity looks like on a daily basis? Does this baptism imagery help? => In Colossians 3, Paul instructs us to clothe ourselves with love. This is baptism imagery. When adults were baptized in the early church they would take off there old clothes and put on a new garment after baptism. The imagery was clear,. The old garment represented a life before God's love. The new garment represented a new life open to God's love and direction. What does is look like to be open to God's love?