When Love Arrives
Let’s begin with some bottom of the heart honesty. The heaviness and heartache over people inciting and enacting violence, and then attempting to justify their words or actions by mentioning or claiming Christianity, leaves me in a puddle of agony and anger.
No matter your back ground or beliefs, please hang with me, as I’d like to pour my energies into what it looks like when Love arrives. There’s an ancient letter found toward the very back of the Bible, it’s a letter to the Hebrews. It begins with these words:
Throughout our history God has spoken to our ancestors by his prophets in many different ways. The revelation he gave them was only a fragment at a time, building one truth upon another. But to us living in these last days, God has spoken to us openly through the language of a Son. God speaks in “Son,” for Jesus is the language of God. And Jesus the Christ is the appointed Heir of everything, for through him God created the panorama of all things and all time.
One more text and then some needed implications. In John’s account of the life of Jesus, we read about when Love arrives:
No one has ever gazed upon the fullness of God’s splendor except the uniquely beloved Son, who is cherished by the Father and held close to his heart.
Now he has unfolded to us the full explanation of who God truly is! (The Passion Translation).
I added italics to the word unfolded, because the Greek language in which this was originally written offers some much needed depth. It’s actually two Greek words put together, which equates to, exēgeomai. And these words put together mean: to draw out in narrative, unfold a teaching, to rehearse.
Jesus walks out the story of the Divine. Jesus unfolds and then explains the blueprints of who the Divine is. Jesus’s very life is a rehearsal for the grand finale, found through his death and resurrection, which begins the Restoration, Renewal and Reconciliation of all things.
Let’s quickly back up to Christmas. This celebration goes well beyond a cute birthday party for a baby boy, as it’s the recognition of the tangible expression and extension of the Divine’s love for all of creation, which includes you and me.
The Divine loved creation so much that the Divine became part of that very same world, in Jesus.
And Jesus proclaimed and embodied nonviolence.
Please don’t be that person who twists Jesus clearing the temple as violence on or towards people. Jesus called out and flipped over a system that was profiting from people’s pain and enslavement. Jesus exposed the affair between the religious elite and a violent empire.
No one was physically threatened or hurt by Jesus… but Jesus himself would be killed through the collusion of the systems he called out.
Christmas announces how the Divine is not distant. The Divine has saved us by becoming one of us. In skin and bones, the Divine has shown us who we truly are and how we can actually live so as to participate in the restoration of all things.
It’s never with violence. It’s not wielding weapons of violence, ever.
To those who quote the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) wherein violence was enacted, please re-read the beginning of the letter to the Hebrews above. It’s saying we no longer claim our immature, smaller, and lesser selves for missing the fully revealed Love found in Jesus. Please don’t claim how you acted as a five year old as justification for garbage decisions you make today. Claiming victimhood to victimize others is not the way of peace.
Jesus never claimed or played victim. Never. Jesus absorbed and transformed death into new life.
Because when Love arrives, so does New Life. With everything that I am, I believe we can place our life on this. But we cannot take life by this.
