Deeply and Fully Loved--February 14, 2024

Deeply and Fully Loved--February 14, 2024

"For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person--though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us." [Romans 5:6-8]

In mid-February, conventional wisdom has given us a set of standard, obvious go-to gestures to show (supposedly) your love for someone else.  On a day like today, which by the delightful quirks of the pop-culture calendar and church year turns out to be both Valentine's Day and the beginning of Lent, you'll find people presenting hastily bought heart-shaped boxes of chocolates, bouquets of roses, glittering jewelry, and a menagerie of stuffed animals.  And all of it is done, we insist, as evidence of "love."  We have successfully (we think) commodified the deepest connection possible in the universe and spray painted it in shades of red and pink.  But, I've got to ask you--is that really any meaningful kind of demonstration of love?  Are any of those consumer goods (marked up to triple their usual price for the Valentine's rush) honestly about love?  Or are they agreed-upon placeholders to signify a transaction--"I give you this box of chocolate, you give me the card you bought, and we call that romance"--rather than genuine love?

I ask because today in particular, the jarring juxtaposition of Ash Wednesday and Valentine's Day shows just how different God's kind of love and our culture's commodified version of "love" really are.  Our culture's performance of love comes in shades of pastel pink and has the taste of saccharin sweetness.  The God whose love is revealed at a cross runs a deeper shape of red and endures bitterness alongside us and for our sake.  The cute symbol of love in our culture at large is a heart (a bloodlessly stylized and symmetrical one at that), brimming with emotions and warm fuzzy feelings; the sign of divine love is the imperial execution stake that God was willing to bear being hung on even when we offered no love to God.  The underlying logic of Valentines-Day-kind-of-love is transactional: I give you something and you give me something, and as long as they are of roughly comparable value, our relationship can continue.  The foundational premise of the gospel is unapologetically unconditional: God in Christ took on death for us, even though we were "ungodly" sinners and enemies.

And this, dear ones is the big deal about the Gospel's love story: unlike the domesticated, commodified, and shallow version of love we get on the aisle endcap displays at Walmart or Target, the claim of the Gospel is that God's love looks like a cross.  We might feel we've gone out of our way to show love if we made an extra trip to the grocery store for a bunch of flowers or spent an extra five minutes in the card aisle, but you'll end up feeling cheated if your spouse, partner, or significant other doesn't show the same level of effort back.  But the apostle Paul says that God has thrown that playbook out and doesn't base divine love on "getting" something of equal value back in return from us.  In fact, for Paul, that's exactly the point:  we humans might, maybe, possibly, hypothetically, consider risking our lives if it meant saving the life of someone we knew to be worthy of it--the war hero, the noble firefighter who had saved so many lives in fires, the Nobel-laureate whose words or discoveries changed the world.  But God, Paul says, shows love to us in dying for a planet full of ungrateful, heart-hearted slobs like us who don't even know to say thank you and are typically so self-absorbed we don't even realize we've been rescued in the first place.  We are loved unconditionally and recklessly by God, and that just throws the whole Valentine's Day economy out of whack--thank God.

Whatever else the cross of Jesus means (and we'll spend our time this Lent in these devotions looking at different angles and insights from the Scriptures on that), Paul starts us off with the insistence that at the cross we are encountered by God's surprising kind of love--the love that does not depend on our worthiness or righteousness, the kind that doesn't reduce to a tit-for-tat transaction, the kind that can embrace us even when we are enemies of God. We can so easily (mis)understand the season of Lent and talk about the cross as merely a forty-day guilt trip about why we are miserable wretches who should just "do better" by sheer willpower. But to actually hear the New Testament writers talk about it, the cross of Jesus is first and foremost the sign of God's indefatigable, unconditional love that outlasts cut flowers and costs God more than convenience-store chocolates.  The cross is the sign, both that we are beloved of God, and of the audacity of that love to embrace us even in the midst of our sin and ungodliness.  It's a deeper love than what you'll find on discount -sale tomorrow in the clearance aisle, and it's just what someone you know is aching to hear from themselves today.  

Maybe, for all the show our culture does on the Valentine's Day side of this date, what we really need today is to let ourselves be deeply and fully loved.

Maybe you'll be the one to speak a word of that kind of love to someone today. Keep your eyes open for whom God might be sending across your path to share it.

Lord Jesus, open our eyes and hearts to your love in all its fullness; allow us to let ourselves be deeply and fully loved.