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1 John 4:7-21 CEB Dear friends, let’s love each other, because love is from God, and everyone who loves is born from God and knows God. The person who doesn’t love does not know God, because God is love. This is how the love of God is revealed to us: God has sent his only Son into the world so that we can live through him. This is love: it is not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son as the sacrifice that deals with our sins. Dear friends, if God loved us this way, we also ought to love each other. No one has ever seen God. If we love each other, God remains in us and his love is made perfect in us. This is how we know we remain in him and he remains in us, because he has given us a measure of his Spirit. We have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son to be the savior of the world. If any of us confess that Jesus is God’s Son, God remains in us and we remain in God. We have known and have believed the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who remain in love remain in God and God remains in them. This is how love has been perfected in us, so that we can have confidence on the Judgment Day, because we are exactly the same as God is in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear, because fear expects punishment. The person who is afraid has not been made perfect in love. We love because God first loved us. Those who say, “I love God” and hate their brothers or sisters are liars. After all, those who don’t love their brothers or sisters whom they have seen can hardly love God whom they have not seen! This commandment we have from him: Those who claim to love God ought to love their brother and sister also Imagine you find yourself on the classic game show, Love Connection, as one of the guests. The dating show where the audience gets to vote on which candidate they think you, the guest, should pursue. The host, Chuck Woolery, introduces each of the potential love connection candidates through their video recordings. The audience gets to see highlights of this candidate and that– details of their lives, what they are looking for in a relationship, but now the last recording ques up, and lo and behold it is God, the Almighty, who pops up! Now, of all three candidates to pick having a relationship with, why choose God? What would stand out about God to the audience? Would God win their vote? Now, maybe this seems silly or sacrilegious, but it gets at a real question, why do you love God? What about the divine causes you to care?
There are so many qualities to choose from, like God’s holiness, goodness, and power! In 1 John, the author points out another quality altogether as a reason for our devotion to God. The author claims “God is love.” Except, this is no mere quality, when the author says that God is love in verse 8, it should be read as “God does love.”[1] In the next set of verses, we see proof that God does love. After all, God sent– another action verb here– “his only Son into the world so that we can live through him.” God acted by sending and sacrificing Jesus, proving love to us. Now, here comes the crazy part, the only way we can see this love, and know that it is true, is through loving one another, not in affection but in action. We have a love chicken and love egg kind of problem here it seems, which comes first? “Does our knowledge of the God who is love cause us to love one another, or is it our love for one another that allows us to know God?”[2] Which is the answer? The short answer to this problem of which one is yes, so let me put it another way. I am no math expert, and by extension, sciences that depend a lot on math, like quantum physics are way beyond me. I like to say that I ended up with a history degree in my undergraduate studies because I was only required to take one math course. One idea that I have a hard time wrapping my mind around is the answer to the physics question, “What is light?” Now, maybe you have already heard this before, but in trying to answer this one question, scientists over centuries have come to realize that light behaves both like a wave and a particle. Light is a wave of energy, rippling across space, like ripples spreading across the surface of a pond, but it also behaves like a particle, like the atoms that make up you and me, things that can collide and transfer energy, like when I clap my hands and a sound is heard. What I am getting at is that there are things held together that can seem like contradictions, or at least like two things that cannot be held together in any satisfying way. We are seemingly left with a question without answer, but in fact, God’s love does not work in any sequential way, like A and then B in the alphabet or light just being just a wave, instead, God’s love is both A and B at the same time, both wave and particle in how it behaves. “God is revealed to us as love in Jesus the Christ, but we cannot accept or understand this revelation without taking upon ourselves the life of love for one another. We love one another because we have known God in Jesus Christ; yet without love we do not truly know this God at all.”[3] Okay, does that make sense? Maybe not, so maybe we need to put this another way altogether, maybe we need to put love into action to see it well. Think of our history as a people, as a human race. When did miracles happen? When did something so radically transforming happen that it took your breath away? What lay at its core? What made the difference? Was it purity, holiness, values, morality, or something else? After all, what caused hearts and minds to change around Civil Rights in our country? Wasn’t it turning on our TVs, opening our newspapers and seeing people, people like you and me, being beaten by police, bitten by dogs, and knocked to the ground by fire hoses? Do you remember the picture of the young man standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square? Have you heard the story of Telemachus who ended the gladiatorial games by going down into the arena? Rather than let the bloodshed continue, he stood between two gladiators pleading with the crowd to stop, until he was stabbed by a gladiator’s sword and stoned by the crowd, an act that cost him his life but caused the emperor to ban gladiatorial combat forever in Rome. What about Jesus? Have you heard how he sacrificed himself on a cross, how the Son gave his life for you and me? No higher love than to give your life for a friend, no truer definition of love, of agape in Greek, than sacrificing our own life for the good of another. The world is changed through love. What is more, 1 John tells us, “No one has ever seen God,” so how would we know this love is real, that this God who loves us is real without Jesus, who shows us love? What is more, 1 John takes it a step further saying, “If we love each other, God remains in us and his love is made perfect in us.” Again and again, 1 John in this section tells us that in loving our siblings, God remains in us. This deity who is invisible who does love, is in us, and this active love is made perfect in us. We know God does love because we have seen it in Jesus, but now God who is in Jesus is now in us when we love. In other words, “Christian love is the ongoing revelation of God.”[4] When we love, when we do love, copying the love we see in Christ, the kind of love that transforms people and transforms the world, is it any wonder the world responds? It is because when we love like this, people don’t just see Paul or Joan or Bill or Pam or Caitlin or Tammy or any one of us? They see God in and through us, they see this love that we are all about! What defines a Christian? What makes us distinctive? After all, all religions have something about morality and right values, and they even cover things like purity and holiness. My goodness, you can even be an atheist and argue your way to ethics and morality! These are not the things that set us apart, our distinctiveness is found in imitating our God’s most distinctive trait, our God does love, and practices it in every interaction and relationship. We find it in the Old Testament in the Hebrew word hesed, steadfast faithfulness or “faithful covenant love [...] one of the ascribed characteristics to God in the Hebrew scriptures.”[5] This is our sole ethic, our one shared call, to do love. To practice what has been revealed to us through Christ, the course of action we need to practice in order to understand God’s love and fully see Christ. That’s the thing, imagine we go back to the Love Connection, back in our guest seat, ready to choose one of our candidates to have a relationship with, but instead of God, the Almighty, in that last tape, it's one of our neighbors, one of our siblings in Christ. Do you see God reflected in them? Would they see God reflected in you? Not just reflected, but made perfect. Do you know that some seeds have to be digested in order to germinate? You can just pluck them and stick them in the ground. They must be eaten, they must be digested, and yes, pooped out in order to grow. Raspberries and blackberries are this way, the hard seeds must be scrapped and scratched in order to grow. God’s love has been taken up and taken in by you and me, it has to live and breathe through all we do, and yes, that causes love to germinate and grow. It's our love connection, it's how people see God in this world. Yes, it's God and yes, it's you too. It's both, and it's beautiful. Amen. [1] David Rensberger, Abingdon New Testament Commentaries: 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, ed. Victor Paul Furnish (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997), 117. [2] Ibid., 124. [3] Ibid. [4] Ibid.,119. [5] Ibid., 117.
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