Debt is one of those things you get into that you can’t wait to get out of, like a bad job, unprofitable work.  Oh, how happy Devon and I were when we paid off our credit card debt!  Paul tells us there is a debt of love (13:8).  That’s a debt I’m glad to pay on, that I don’t want to stop paying on.  It’s a debt that we Christians especially owe one another, because we owe it to God.  How indebted we are to God!  Each breath, each moment is on loan to us from God.  Are we improving it?  As we have the Holy Spirit, beloved, we are; strange to say, somehow, someway, by the Spirit we are improving each God-given moment.  We take out loans to do things, big things.  Beloved, consider the debt we owe to God, and do big things with it.  When we love one another, we are doing something big.

To love others is to fulfill the Law (13:8, 10).  God’s Torah, His sacred, holy instruction for life, is really teaching one thing: love.  Does love need to be taught?  Don’t we already just know how to love?  Don’t we already just know what love looks like and does not look like, what love does and does not do?  Yes and no.  Even pagans, stuck on this side of the void between us and God, even pagans know how to give good things.  People know how to withhold them, too.  If you’ve been in a relationship, as child, parent, spouse, or love interest, with someone who made a game of love, who played at withholding love, you know there are people who have yet to learn what love truly is.  I’ll love you if.  I will only love you if you.  Let’s turn that around: you can only love me if.  You can only love me if you approve of me, approve of what I do, what I want, what I say.  If you do not approve, then you do not really love.

Does that sound right, though?  Parents?  Is there nothing troubling about such conditional love?  Those who insist upon conditions—their conditions—are quick to remind us that to love others is to fulfill the Law.  As we fail to love others, we fail to fulfill the Law.  As we fail to fulfill the Law, we are hypocrites, claiming to love while being unloving because we do not approve.  What is love without approval?  Approval is love.  Yet I thought God is love.

Is God love?  Or is love our god?  Do you perceive the difference?  It’s crucial!  If God is love (1 Jn 4:8), as Scripture tells us so wonderfully, so beautifully, so movingly, then God Himself is the standard of love.  If we want to know what perfect love is, we must learn it from God.  We can only learn true love from God.  God tells us what love is, what love looks like, what love does.  God also tells us what love is not, what love does not look like, and what love does not do.  Love does not approve of what God does not approve.  Love does not condone sin or make excuses for sin, does not overlook sin or call it by another name.

Consider the alternative, the current dogma: as love is our god, love is the standard of love.  If we want to know what love is, we must learn it from love.  Only love can show us what love is, looks like, and does.  To say love is love tells me nothing, tells me nothing about love.  Yes is yes.  A equals A.  A rose is a rose is a rose.  To say love is god is to speak as an idolater.  Ancient peoples had many stories about this god called love.  The god called love acted remarkably—suspiciously—like us: played games, was deceitful, pathologically jealous, and tended to kill the loved one.  Better a dead loved one than the end of the love feelings.  When love is your god, you always come to the end of the love feelings.

However, when you know that God is love, you know love never ends (1 Cor 13:8 RSV), because God never ends (see, for example, Ex 15:18, Ps 90:2, Ps 102:25-27).  When you know that God is love, you know love has no beginning, because God always has been; therefore, love has always been: God’s love for you is an eternal love, and that is a mighty love.

The world talks much of love yet knows so little about it, until we know God.  Until we know God, we do not truly know what love means.  Until we know God, we do not know what love truly looks like, we just fumble in the dark.  Until we know God, we continually, habitually, willfully get love wrong, all wrong.  We feel this; we see it all around us.  Just look at this world.  Just look at what our confusion and willfulness have done.  The heart is deceitful above all things (Jer 17:9).  Who can cure it?

          Paul reminds us that the commandments are really outworkings of the command to love your neighbor as yourself (13:9, Lev 19:18): one of the most blessed ways in which we live our love for God.  We love others, not so much for the sake of others as for the sake of God.  When we love others for the sake of God who loves us truly with an eternal love, we learn how to love the unlovable, and that is a divine quality, indeed!

Harming your neighbor is not love (13:10).  That goes without saying, but there is something there that needs saying: love does no harm.  In this, love is much like medicine.  Love is for healing, for treating sickness and injury.  Love is for those who are hurt, wounded, sick: Jesus shows us this, gracefully, joyfully, powerfully, heart-breakingly.

What the Law, the Torah, God’s sacred, holy instruction for life is saying, over and over, so as somehow, hopefully, to get the message through our sin-hardened hearts, our will-hardened heads, is that love looks like something.  Love looks like compassion, patience, acceptance.  Love looks like Christ.  Because love looks like Christ, love looks like Truth.  God is love, oh, yes.  And God is truth.  Where truth fails to love, it is not of God.  Where love fails to speak the truth, it is not of God.  Love looks like God in action.  Love is God in action.  Not false love, with which we are too well acquainted.  We continue to substitute false love for God’s love: we know love does no harm, yet we say we don’t know how to help because it feels like to help is to hurt, so we begin to believe the world’s lies about love because we’re here and that’s easier.  Love that does not help, that does not offer healing, true healing of the true wound, such love is not of God.  What is not of God is not love, no matter what name we may want to call it or what others tell us we must call it.

What does love look like here, today, now, for you?  Love is God in action.  Love is for healing.  Bread and juice, Christ’s broken body, his spilled blood, terrible and wonderful, powerful, deep as the heart of God, sin-shattering, death-destroying, life-bringing, salvation-giving.  Love looks like grace, because it is, because, at heart, God is love.  Grace is God’s love in action.

Love can accept without approving.  That’s called grace.  This is the holy wisdom of love, the grace of love.  When we love others for the sake of God who loves us with an eternal love, we learn how to love the unlovable: a divine quality, indeed!  Beloved, it is possible to accept yet not approve.  You accept and love your children, though you do not approve of everything they have done or still do or will do.  God accepts us.  I assure you, He does not approve of a single one of us.  He does not approve of me in the least.  I am so glad, I rejoice, that God accepts me, in Jesus Christ, for the sake of Jesus Christ.  God sent Jesus so that, in Jesus, God could make us acceptable to Him.  In Jesus Christ, God loves the unlovable—us!  In Jesus Christ, God accepts the unacceptable—us!  He wants to accept us, though He will not let our muddy feet shamble over His white carpet.  He’s not about to let us wash our bloody hands on His spotless white linen.  So He washes us.  We are washed in the blood of the lamb.

Talking that way sounds very odd, especially to people outside the faith, but it is the blood of Jesus that atones, that washes away our sin.  Unless I wash you, Jesus tells Peter, you can have no part in me (Jn 13:8).  Here, at this table, we partake of Christ; we receive and give love, here, as we have received faith, the faith that opened our hearts to the love of God, that opened our hearts to love God.  From this table, we know love.  God loves us just as we are and loves us too much to let us remain that way.

Now, to the One who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all we can ask or imagine, to God be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.