Love's New Extension

Acts 11:1-18; John 13:31-35; Revelation 21:1-8

Central Baptist Church, Lowesville, VA

06 May 2007

We are all too often unsurprised in our reading of the Bible. We take its stories and teachings for granted, without allowing their impact to surprise or awaken us to the shocking nature of God’s love. The disciples were constantly being surprised by Jesus’ words and actions. He often made them as uncomfortable as he made the powerful of his day. Crowds came to hear him, even while being shocked by the upsetting quality of Jesus’ life ethic and teaching on God’s overwhelmingly gracious love. Are we ready to be surprised by the full scope of God’s love? Are we willing to allow God’s love to transform the extent of our own?

Peter has received much abuse as the loudmouth who spoke first and thought later. Time after time, we find him with a foot in his mouth, another following hard on its heels. The truth is, he was constantly being surprised at the character of Jesus’ teaching. Even after the resurrection, God was still working with Peter to stretch him into the servant he was called to become. As Luke records the events of Peter’s heading to Cornelius’ home, we make too little of his telling the story more than once. For Jews to reach into the Gentile world with the gospel of grace was an overwhelming leap of faith.

Luke first tells of Paul’s Gentile commission, then quickly backtracks to tell Peter’s Gentile story twice. Before Luke can begin speaking legitimately of Paul’s Gentile ministry, he felt it necessary to lay a solid foundation for this completely unexpected twist. No news for us who have heard the story for decades, Jewish believers considered grace offered freely to Gentiles unimaginable. The Gentiles made them uncomfortable. They thought them too removed from God’s “good graces” to bother with. It seemed obvious that Jesus had come as the promised Messiah for Israel—Yahweh’s chosen people. If Gentiles wanted in on the blessing, they should prove their worth by first becoming Jews!

Gentiles ate disgusting foods, participated in occult practices, deemed promiscuity an acceptable part of idol worship, and did not appropriately respect life as a loan from God. It was a shock to find that even such Gentiles had been granted access to God’s offer of forgiveness, grace, and love. It was a big step to embrace those on the outside with God’s loving embrace. Why is it still so hard to love those whose lives challenge our standards and assumptions, letting God love through us?

We don’t have to look too far to find people who make us uncomfortable. It is not too hard to find people who live according to different cultural norms, values, and principles. Is it any easier for us to reach out to people in our own community who are different? Perhaps we find barriers of language, culture, expectations, or lifestyle choices. Can we express the faith to adopt people in our midst who do not share our support systems of definitions of acceptable parameters for living? Are we willing to embrace strangers and those we consider strange in expressions of God’s love?

Jesus had other strange things to say. He spoke of forgiveness that did not measure the level of one’s repentance. He spoke of giving to others to the point of giving away one’s means of support. He spoke of trusting God when everything we learned in school, church, and life proclaims all as lost. That last night with the disciples, he reaffirmed a new rule for living to replacing all others: “Love one another. By degree and manner that I have loved you, shall you also love one another.” The character of this love in all its breadth and depth would be the means by which the world might identify the faithful disciple. How willing are we to allow God to love through us to such unguarded degree?

Our cultural Christian heritage has taught us many things about the way we should live. We have been taught Jesus’ words, but also the ethic of our society. We have been encouraged to temper Jesus’ words, thereby adapting them to our new reality. They should not interfere with chasing the American Dream. They should not interfere with economic advancement. They should not interfere with questions of health, welfare, and comfort. Would Jesus recognize his words as we have been taught to apply them to daily living?

In teaching us to love one another and even our enemies, how would Jesus respond to our war on terror? Is it justifiable for a nation to resort to self-defense or pre-emptive action, when Jesus taught that we are to love by granting absolute forgiveness and turn the other cheek? Jesus did not speak about this kind of unselfish love in the abstract. He reaffirmed love for all as he announced his impending journey to the cross. He declared that as disciples, we are to embody this same quality of love, this same character of love, this same degree of love. Is it really possible and needful to allow the full scope of Jesus’ love to flow though us, even when it demands sacrificing issues of personal advancement?

John’s vision of the new heavens and new earth is couched in terms of a wholly new and as yet unknown reality. As is his norm in Revelation, he announces new characters without the use of definite articles, so to help us understand that the character has not yet appeared in the text. This heaven and earth he introduces here are distinct from the earlier known images. They portray a new character and reality that we have yet to experience. There is no more opposition to God’s will in this new reality that he presents. They sea, an image of opposition, no longer even exists. This vision is of a reality that is both present and future. At once, he speaks of the new that is and the new that will be.

The greatest reality he presents is God’s loving presence immediately available within human experience. God lives among mortal humanity, even amid our experience of distress, suffering, pain, loss, discomfort, actively wiping away our tears as a mother comforts her injured child. Amid distress comes the hope of God’s immediate presence mitigating our pain, ushering us into a new realm of life.

This new reality transforms our knowledge of life. John speaks of God’s peoples, not one nation, but many nations, gathered in God’s presence and God personally with them all. Both present and future, this reality of God’s new creation transcends our experience. It carries us beyond not only our understanding of the scope of God’s love, but beyond our limited experience of living in full submission to God’s gracious presence. This reality that is and will be is the aim of life as believers and disciples in Christ Jesus, God’s Lamb. Are we preparing to truly enjoy God’s eternal, immediate presence?

We still think that being too heavenly minded makes us of no earthly good. We still believe we must live according to earthly realities, awaiting for death to introduce us to God’s full presence. Only on that other side of “Jordan’s Stormy Banks” do we feel we can truly begin living according to Jesus’ ethic of absolute forgiveness, unconditionally love, and unmitigated grace. John says it is now time to live as God’s Lamb lived and died. The new reality is already in process.

Do we have the courage and faith to look upon current reality as God desires us to interact with society? Will we allow this wholly other way of heavenly living to work through our living? When did we last notice God’s unmitigated love becoming reality through our lives? Is it not already time we became vessels of this surprising extension of God’s love?

—©2007 Christopher B. Harbin