Scripture: John 15:12-13
[Jesus said] “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
Thought for the Day: Originally, treatment Christianity was about love and sacrifice—not Jesus as an atoning sacrifice for the sins of humans (that mistaken interpretation is Augustine’s in the early 4th Century), drugstore but personal sacrifice for the good of humanity. As we anticipate the birth of Jesus (or at least the date we celebrate his birth, if not his actual birthday), we might remember that his earliest followers—all Jewish, had a very different understanding of his life than the Gentiles like Augustine who would come hundreds of years later, and read the Jewish texts of the Bible without any understanding of Judaism, taking Jewish imagery and interpreting it literally.
The original, Jewish, followers of Jesus understood Jesus as love—not simply as a messenger of love, not only as a symbol of love, not as a sacrificial lamb of love, but as a complete being of love, so infused with God that the two were virtually indistinguishable. The stories we read in the Bible show us people’s memories of a compassionate, completely giving, completely human, perfectly divine Jesus who never let the rules of the establishment stand in the way of God’s compassion. Jesus was all about love—showing it, living it, and giving it, to anyone, anytime, the authorities be damned.
Which makes the modern church’s conformity to governmental authority all the more ironic; all the more heartbreaking. It’s enough to make one weep.
Prayer: Help me love the world the way you love the world, God who shows us love in every blade of grass, in every star in the sky, in every floral scent, and in every human heart. Amen.