"Asymmetrical Love"--August 5, 2019

"Asymmetrical Love"--August 5, 2019

"But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful." [Luke 6:35-36]

No disrespect intended here, but the Beatles were wrong.

The Fab Four's last album, Abbey Road, famously concludes with a song called, simply, "The End." The two minute song spends about a minute and a half of guitar solos from Paul, John, and George, before a single couplet provides the song's only lyrics: "And in the end, the love you take... is equal to the love you make."

I'm sure they thought it was singularly profound poetry.  (And, to be fair, it is a pretty awesome guitar solo leading up to that lyric, which is at least a couple notches up from "She loves you--yeah, yeah, yeah" for what it's worth.)

But if you take that line at face value, the last meaningful message the Beatles imparted boiled down to, "There is a strict equality between how much love you give out and how much is given back to you."  The worldview of "The End," if taken seriously, insists that you never get more love than you put into the system.  It sounds like a Newtonian moral universe, where every action, good or bad, as an equal and opposite reaction.  Do good, and get the exact same amount of goodness sent back your way (eventually).  And presumably also, don't do very much good, and you'll see the same meager goodness bouncing back into your life.

All of which to say, there is no room for grace in such a universe.  The notion that you get back in this life what you give out in this life may just sound like the law of karma, but as the lead singer of another famous band from across the Pond puts it, "Grace... she travels outside of karma" (See "Grace," by U2, from the album "All That You Can't Leave Behind").

And when it comes to asking what Jesus has to say on the subject, Jesus lands firmly on the side of grace.  Jesus insists that the universe is not--even morally speaking--a closed system of equal and opposite actions and reactions.  Jesus insists that by the economy of grace, God loves people who don't love God back, and the people of God will be known for their willingness to love with that kind of unconditional disregard for whether they "take" as much as they "make."

In the end, for Jesus, this turns out to be the defining way we reflect his character, and show ourselves, like Jesus, to be sons and daughters of God.  We love, not just those who have loved us first, but the people who have been rotten to us.  We do good, not just for those who can return the favor, but for people who will either never know what we have done for them or for people who actively dislike us.  We give, not just to people who will pay us back, but to people who have no means of paying the debt back, or people who will not even express appreciation for the gift.  We keep promises, not just to the people who keep their commitments to us, but even to the people who let us down, flake out on us, forget their promises, or don't mean what they say.  And the reason we do these things, Jesus says, is because that's how God operates in the world--and God is raising us like children in a household to live in a certain way.

Jesus makes no bones about just how starkly asymmetrical God's kind of love really is.  God, according to Jesus, "is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked."  That is a bold rejection of the "You only get as much love as you give" equation-based system that the Beatles sing about.  And Jesus says that is the very core of God's being.  

In fact, it's significant that Luke has the line, "Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful," in the very same speech where Matthew's version of the parallel passage says, "Be perfect, just as your Father is perfect."  That suggests that God's kind of perfection, God's kind of "holiness," isn't about running squeamishly from sin and sinners so as to avoid being "tainted" by them, but in fact, just the opposite--running out with open arms to give love away to people who won't return the favor, won't say thank you, and are actively being "wicked." That's what we are called to, and that's the way we are called to be "perfect," too--not in the sense of "without any blemishes or mess-ups on our permanent record," but in the sense of "so completely moved by unconditional love that even enemies, jerks, and stinkers receive it, too."

This is the revolutionary posture of the followers of Jesus, and this is, ultimately, the way we are called to reflect Christ into the world.  The world doesn't need more people wearing gaudy cross necklaces or putting fish stickers on their cars to bring "religion" into the public sphere.  Jesus says that we will most clearly reflect Christ when we love recklessly, without concern for getting the same love shown back to us, and running the risk that it might go unappreciated, unrecognized, or even met with hostility.

The world around us is fueled by a bloodthirsty need to get even, to get revenge, to get "payback," and frighteningly with even more frequency, to "get them before they get us."  When that impulse is fed by fear and given scapegoats to focus hatred toward, it becomes a sort of sick logical conclusion that you will have people taking up assault weapons and driving nine hours to a shopping center in El Paso to open fire on people there, after leaving a manifesto steeped in the fear of "those people" and the fear that "those people" will come and "get us."  So often, we stare at our feet silently, hemming and hawing that we have no idea what makes such things happen, when we are getting more and more instances where a gunman come out and directly say to the world that they are motivated by a cowardly fear of some group and decide they must pre-emptively "get them before they get us."  It is all grounded in a view of the world that is stripped of grace, a world of terrible symmetry, in which you attack the ones you view as enemies, you do good only to people who are "like you" enough to pay you back some time, and in which love is always some kind of transaction for your own self-interest.

It is against this backdrop that Jesus says, "God loves those who are directly opposed to God, and God is kind to people who have made themselves God's enemies."  And it is because of who God is that we are called to reflect the same kind of asymmetrical love into the world--love for those who hate us, kindness toward those you think will take advantage of it, good toward those who have let you down or treated you like you don't matter.  

And all of that is because, for us as followers of Jesus, in the end, the love of God is greater than any of what God "gets" back from us.  God is ok with that.  God is willing to run an entire universe on an economy of grace.

Lord Jesus, let us reflect you today in the ways we do good to those even whom we find it most difficult to love--and let us glimpse the presence of God there.