2^nd June 2012

Rev Dr Max Champion at St John's UCA Mt Waverley Sunday 6 May 2012

Lessons - Psalm 36:5-10; 1 John 4:7-21; John 15:1-11

'God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God
abides in them.' (1 John 4:16b NRSV)

Love! Singers make their names singing about love. 'Love is in the air.'
'All you need is love.' It is said that 'love makes the world go 'round'.
Christians worship the God 'who so loves the world'. At weddings and
funerals readings about love (sacred and secular) are often chosen. Love
seems the most natural of affections. It knits us together - as friends,
partners, families, churches, clubs, nations and human beings.

All the same, love can be tricky. It can be misdirected or not returned.
It can be sentimental, obsessive or restricted to our own circle. Fear of
love can immobilise us. 'False love' ruins relationships, excludes
outsiders and blinds us to flaws in ourselves, our loved ones, our causes
and our country. It cannot hide the fact that, in reality, our
relationships are more often than not characterised by conflict than love.

Love is less common than we like to think. Yet the popularity of songs,
programs and movies that deal with love is a sign that, in a strife-torn
world, we yearn for something that overcomes enmity and relates us more
deeply with others.

At such times, it is likely that we will 'look for love in all the wrong
places'! Today, for example, it is widely held that there are no
'boundaries' to 'love'. Wherever feelings for another person are returned,
a relationship is said to be 'loving'. The distinction between true and
false love, where mutual consent is given, is strenuously rejected.

What are we to make of love? In The Four Loves CS Lewis makes the helpful
distinction between 'need loves' and 'gift love'. There is something
deeply embedded in humanity that moves us to connect with the world around
us - to enjoy beauty, friendship, marriage, sport, arts, country and the
like. It is a God-given need to love the earth!

The 'natural loves' are not to be dismissed - as sometimes they have been
by Christian thinkers - as being inferior to 'supernatural love'. A
Nygren, for example, made a sharp distinction between the 'erotic loves'
(which are natural to all) and 'agapic love' (which is distinctive of
followers of Christ). He rightly pointed out that love of Christ is to be
our highest priority and should not be confused with other 'loves'. But he
does not show adequately the integral connection between the two forms of
love in the Christian life.

CS Lewis does not belittle the natural loves. But he points out that, in
themselves, they are not sufficient. Their true purpose is revealed in the
light of God's uniquely redemptive love. Without knowing God who loves us
in spite of our unlovableness, we cannot truly love our similarly flawed
brothers and sisters.

In 1 John 4:7ff the love of God is magnificently affirmed as 'love divine,
all loves excelling' (Australian Hymn Book 148). John is not writing about
'love' because he is a hopeless romantic! He is battling influential
leaders in the fragile Christian community around AD100 who, like many
today, denied that God's love was uniquely embodied in Christ.

So John affirms that God's love is unlike any other - as is love for
others that springs from knowing God's 'all-excelling love'. (In this
passage 'agape' is used some 30 times.) Thus John insists that it is not
'our love for God' that defines love! It is what God, in his grace, has
done in Christ for us! Christian love is grounded in the Divine Love.
Apart from that, how could we begin to 'love our enemies and pray for
those who persecute us'? (Jesus in Matthew 5:43ff)

John urges us to 'love one another' because 'God is love'. The starting
point is not 'our (natural) love for God' but 'God's (extraordinary) love
for us'. 'Love' is not simply one of God's characteristics but is God's
'essence'. God is not an impersonal life-force that permeates the universe
but the One whose 'steadfast love' (Old Testament hesed) is displayed in
the creation and redemption of the world. In Israel's history and in the
Person of Christ, God's love for wayward humans has been emphatically
unveiled and embodied.

There is nothing 'sentimental' about God's love. It cannot be reduced to a
'generally acceptable ideal'. God's love is singularly costly, self-giving
and sacrificial. It is the 'all-excelling love' of the incarnation and
crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father and Saviour of the
world (v14).

'In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his
Son to be the expiation or atoning sacrifice for our sins (v10 RSV, NRSV).
As we say in the baptism service, 'we love, because God first loved us'
(v19).

This language makes many of us shudder. The image of a God who sacrifices
his Son for the sins of the world is objectionable to those who think of
themselves as basically decent people. How can such an act be called
'love'?

A great deal has been said and written about the atonement. The main thing
to keep in mind is that the image of Christ's sacrifice on the cross must
be understood strictly as an act of 'God's unique self-giving love' for
us. It is the singular expression of the love of Father, Son and Spirit
(vv 13,14) for us flawed human beings. There is no division between the
Jesus who loves us and the 'angry Father' who does not.

The precise meaning of the Greek word 'expiation' (hilasmos) is unclear.
It may mean to pacify a person whose honour is offended or to remove the
taint of evil. In either case, it conveys 'something' of the extent to
which God is prepared to go to forgive his wayward children and restore
them to life. Such is God's love for us that, in Christ / Son, God /
Father suffers in the midst of our flawed and strife-torn history in a
manner that is both uncompromising towards evil and tirelessly gracious
towards all who do evil (para CH Dodd, The Johannine Epistles 1946 p27).

Talk of sin, evil and forgiveness does not sit well with those who,
surprisingly, think that it is relatively easy to be loving. In a world
where barbaric acts and good intentions both cause so much conflict in
relationships you would think that news about being redeemed from the
power of sin would be welcomed!

At the end of World War 2 Dodd wrote this moving passage that expresses
something of what John means by 'removing the taint of sin / expiation':

'Our generation, confronted with the "mystery of iniquity" upon so
vast a scale, is perhaps more ready than our immediate predecessors
to receive with some understanding the doctrine of Christ's
expiation. Wicked things have been done, and are being done, which
shame us all and defile our common humanity. We grope about for means
of redress; but we know that whatever we may do or resolve, the shame
and defilement remain, and no one of our generation can ever be clear
in his own conscience. The Gospel "speaks to our condition" when it
assures us, not only that God loves the world and is ready to forgive
our sin, but that His love has been expressed concretely and
objectively in history to provide the means of sterilising human
wickedness and effecting a forgiveness which is not merely an amnesty
or indulgence, but the radical removal of the taint. We may not be
able to give a fully reasoned theology of the matter, but we are
entitled to believe, in face of the degradation of our common
humanity, that God has done in Christ all that needs to be done to
cleanse us, and done it with the complete adequacy possible only to
infinite power and love.' (pp 28,29)

It does not say everything about atonement. But it does speak to us at a
time when the 'degradation of our common humanity' is plain, not only in
barbaric regimes - like Syria - but also in nihilistic societies - like
ours - which, until now, have been built on foundations of Christian love
and enlightened humanitarianism. When true love is trampled under foot it
speaks to us of a love for one another that springs from knowing the most
extraordinary love ever to have appeared in history: incarnate and
crucified love that reaches out to us and all people and seeks to restore
us to communion with God.

What a joy and privilege it is to know the 'all-excelling love of God' who
frees us from the power of sin and enables us to transform our 'natural
loves' - for husbands and wives, our love of partners, families, work,
sport, leisure, causes, country and the like - without idealising them.

In a world where people are 'hungry for love' this word badly needs to be
heard. For, unlike sentimental or self-serving love, the sacrificial love
of God displayed in Christ 'saves' us from being duped by the false
attractions of love so that, through the work of the Spirit (v13) we may
freely give our first loyalty to Christ and, at the same time, strengthen
and sanctify our 'natural loves'.

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Rev Dr Max Champion is minister in the St John's Uniting Church,
Mt Waverley, Victoria, Australia. Dr Champion is Chair of the Assembly of
Confessing Congregations within the UCA.