Risking It For Love--May 18, 2023

Risking It For Love--May 18, 2023

"For it is better to suffer for doing good, if suffering should be God's will, than to suffer for doing evil. For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit..." [1 Peter 3:17-18]

Okay, let's get this clear from the beginning here: it's not that God demands a certain amount of suffering from people, or that God requires we endure pain to prove our commitment.  Rather, it's that God sends us as witnesses of love into a world full of cruelty, hatred, and cold indifference, and that may well mean we absorb pain as we do God's will in the midst of it all.

If your neighbor's house is on fire, I suppose you could risk getting burned if you ran in to their family room and attempted to steal their TV set... or you could risk getting burned running upstairs to rescue the kid who is calling for help from a bedroom window. The first one is certainly not God's will, but I think you could make a case that the Spirit might just be directing you to help the child, even if that means taking on personal risk for the sake of love.  Or in a similar way, when the thieves attack the man on the Jericho Road in Jesus' famous parable, they risked injury or suffering if he would have landed a few punches or kicks on them when they attempted to rob him.  Meanwhile, the Samaritan traveler who stops and helps him once the robbers have left him for dead also took the risk that this could all be a trap, and he did incur a loss from the money, time, and resources he spent on caring for the neighbor who was injured.  And clearly, Jesus thinks that the thieves aren't models of doing God's will, but the Samaritan man certainly is.  So yeah, sometimes doing good will carry with the risk of a certain amount of suffering.  And to that extent, as people called to risk showing love in a world of pain, we might say that God's will calls us to be willing to endure that pain for the sake of others.

But let's be clear that First Peter is NOT insisting that God demands our suffering to satisfy some divine sadistic streak. Nor does God require our pain to make us "tough" or "worthy" or "acceptable." God does indeed call us to love, though, and that love might well lead us into places of suffering. And God calls us into that love without keeping score or accounting how much others owe us for our trouble.  When the neighbor's kid is calling for help from the burning window, I don't call to mind all the times his football ended up in my yard or the time he toilet papered my tree--I go to help.  When the Samaritan stopped to help the Jewish man laying at the roadside, he didn't get held up by grudges from all the times Judean people had mocked him, ignored him, or insulted him--he helped.  Love that is genuine is going to risk suffering, and it will even risk suffering for the sake of people who have inflicted suffering on us before, whether great or small.  First Peter is calling us to that kind of genuine love.

And of course, he doesn't just use hypotheticals with a neighbor's house catching fire, or a thought experiment about a traveler on the Jericho Road.  First Peter points us right to Jesus, who "also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God."  And this is the gospel difference: Christ Jesus has already shown us this kind of love before we've done a thing.  Jesus doesn't wait to see if we'll turn out to be decent and loving people, and then decide that makes us worthy of dying for--he has already gone into the burning building to rescue us without any checking of the heavenly ledger.  And once we've been claimed by such mercy, how can we not respond to the world around with the same love that risks pain and doesn't count costs?

This is really what the Christian faith and life hangs on--it is the discovery of how we have been loved, and how that love shapes us in its own likeness.  It is in the realization that we've been loved by God without any divine bean-counting or grudge-holding, so that we are now free to love the ones around us with the same kind of reckless abandon God has shown us in Christ.  Today, that might not send you into a burning building or down the Jericho Road, but it will certainly send you across the paths of others to whom we are called to reflect God's own wildly free love.

Have your eyes open--the ones to whom God is sending us may be just around the bend.

Lord Jesus, give us the courage that comes from knowing we are your beloved to risk pain or hardship for the sake of loving others around us without keeping score.