Our calling as Christians to “love one another deeply from the heart” is far easier said than done. Fulfilling the calling of which Peter reminds us requires a reorientation of our notions regarding our relationship with God. If we run and hide from a punitive God who judges harshly our missteps, we place limitations on that love. If instead we consider seriously the depth of love shown in the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, we take the limits off and love as Christ loved us.
1 Peter 1:17-23
17 If you invoke as Father the one who judges all people impartially according to their deeds, live in reverent fear during the time of your exile. 18 You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold, 19 but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish. 20 He was destined before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of the ages for your sake. 21 Through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God.
22 Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart. 23 You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God.
In this passage Peter writes that our entire human understanding of God needs review. The common view of God as parental figure evaluating our behavior is challenged in the first verse. Peter warns that thinking of God as our judge, even an impartial and ‘fair one’ is to too narrow and misses the point. Thankfully, our Father in heaven does not judge all people according to their deeds. When everyone is guilty, impartiality just means we are all in trouble. We have been ransomed from the ways of our ancestors. This is the radical, saving shift that God introduces into the world with the gift of his Son. Without God’s intervention in Jesus, we are shackled to our human way of seeing. Peter argues this new reality (Jesus) was ‘destined before the foundation of the world’ but only recently revealed. Jesus gave us a different way to know God, a new way to trust God and a new path to follow God. Human ways of thinking and living had to be altered. We are called into a new life and we are called to live that way—‘to love one another deeply from the heart.” This is the gospel in a nutshell and the message of hope Peter offered to a persecuted people. So let’s break it down and let it break into our lives.
We began our Lenten journey with our earliest ancestors and their fatal—but all too human—way of thinking about God. Our first understandings of God are almost universally parental. We almost always initially understand God through the eyes of our childhood. It is understandable but severely limits God to what we experience. These are the ‘futile ways inherited from your ancestors.’ Often, the first understanding of the ‘Fall’ is human disobedience followed by divine punishment—expulsion from the Garden and a life of hard labor. Even if we suppose God is loving, he is offering ‘tough love’—our pain is a consequence of our behavior.
But over these last several weeks, I have tried to suggest that our ‘original’ sin was not disobedience. Rather it was our hiding—it was our separating ourselves. It was our inability to trust the love of God. In any system where choices are offered, bad choices will be made. Every parent knows this—and certainly God does. But what separates us from God is not our disobedience but is a child’s view. The problem is our distrust, our hiding and our excuse making. We cannot imagine a God who loves us in the full knowledge of our disobedience and failings. Our categories of goodness and badness ‘automatically’ exclude us from God’s love when we disobey, fail or are simply not enough. We are ‘bad’ and deserve punishment. It took Jesus’ life and ultimately his death and resurrection to show us our way is not God’s way.
The moral judgments are ours—it is the ‘futile ways inherited from our ancestors.’ It is our attempt to impose our idea of ‘good and evil’ unto God. We leap from descriptors like ‘painful’ to characterizations like ‘bad.’ From there we become bad people because we disobey. Disobedience becomes the cause of his disapproval. Obedience becomes the pathway to God.
In real life, smallness is dangerous. I remember one woman telling me how frustrated she was to learn her daughter’s first memory was when she was almost spanked by her mother. It didn’t matter how much she had been fed and held, the memory of fear was the memory that was etched. Children’s earliest memories frequently include being lost, frightened when their parents were angry, afraid they did something wrong when accidents occurred. We are far more likely to be overwhelmed and even injured when we are small.
It is no wonder that the faith of our ancestors viewed experiences of vulnerability as bad. In real life they are not only painful, they expose our failings and our disobedience. It is absolutely human to try to mitigate our fear. It is nearly impossible to imagine that we are loved as we are—especially when ‘as we are’ includes attributes we struggle desperately to avoid, manage and hide. But Jesus ‘ransoms’ us from our human assumptions about who is loved and how we are loved. He lived a life reliant upon God. He trusted God’s love for him no matter what happened to him. Jesus taught that loving is what really matters and that, contrary to human reckoning, vulnerability was required for both love and life. His resurrection showed that vulnerability is survivable.
Living that faith is the resurrection life. But, without seeing the Jesus who lives, his teaching and good example are sermons that don’t make it to the real world. We literally need to see someone ‘walk the walk’ instead of just talk the walk. But it was an expensive gift. And it was a gift Jesus chose to give.
But once we see what is ultimate and eternal. Once we seek to rely upon God (again we will fail more than we succeed), our faith and hope are set on God. That is the salvation that is imperishable. We are changed. We live our lives differently. We seek to love ourselves and others the way Christ taught. In the words of Peter, we love one another deeply from the heart.
For me, this is a high calling that immediately creates a problem. I can orient myself toward love, I can choose vulnerability, I can seek to suspend my human judgments but at every point, I will reach a limit. There are some people I do not love. There are times I am too selfish to be kind and there are times my judgments are so deeply ingrained, their toxicity is too familiar for me to even notice. The needs my family, much less the world, exceed my energy and desire. I am almost always offering an approximation of what is asked and needed—sometimes out of love and sometimes out of obligation. This is the life dilemma we struggled with in Faith in Real Life. It is easy to say ‘Love one another deeply’ and to say ‘We are not Jesus’ but finding the line between the needs around us and what we can actually give and it is hard and ambiguous.
Struggling with this line requires at least two things—facing our vulnerabilities and experiencing the Risen Lord. First, we have to face our own limitations. Truth be told, for whatever reason, sometimes we do not want to respond. It is one thing to say ‘I can’t’ and another to say I don’t want to. That is probably always true some of the time but as a Christian, it is embarrassing to know and confess. I could give more money but I don’t want to. I could drive across town for you but I don’t want to. Aren’t those thoughts selfish and unbecoming of a Christian? This is when it is most tempting to hide. We hide by saying the requests are unreasonable. We try to arbitrate what is ‘fair’ and ‘unfair’. We have multiple little white lies and strategies of avoidance. But in each case, we are avoiding confronting what we consider unattractive and unbecoming in ourselves. And we certainly have a hard time bringing those thoughts to God. But our faith claim is that vulnerability is the way to love and the way to God. It is how Jesus lived.
And fortunately it is how he continues to live. Loving deeply is unsustainable unless we are loved. Where we can only imagine judgment and shame, Jesus offers embrace and inclusion. And each time we risk our uncertain limited selves with each other, we act in the faith that God’s love will sustain us. And each time we receive another; we make flesh those promises of love. The living word is the Risen Lord. He gives us new life—not of perishable but of imperishable seed.
Love each other deeply from the heart. Let be so.
