For Sunday
Lent 4B
Collect
Gracious Father, whose blessed Son Jesus Christ came down from heaven to be the true bread which gives life to the world: Evermore give us this bread, that he may live in us, and we in him; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
Reading
Reflection
God is love.
Knowing that love is the very substance of God changes the way we see it. Love ceases to be simply an emotion. It isn’t only a feeling. It becomes a vehicle of faith and a manifestation of God in our midst.
So why then do we wage war? Murder or abuse? The easy answer, of course, is that this is not of God. But the more difficult part is how we do this in the name of God.
The discovery of widespread abuse of indigenous persons in the United States and Canada into the 20th Century through Christian schools—stealing of children under the guise of saving them—shows the dark side of acts we claim are loving. This isn’t just a problem for Roman Catholics or Evangelicals. Anglicans and Episcopalians, too.
There’s a twist at the heart of the conviction that God loved the world through Jesus that may lead us to see love askew. That we make our goal to evangelize and make others like us. A kind of Borg-like assimilation for the Almighty. Or to defend God’s honor to our own deaths.
These are such cynical and disappointing ways of seeing God’s dream for creation. And they don’t pass the sniff test. The one Presiding Bishop Curry always reminds us to use.
Does it look like love? If it’s not of love, it’s not of God.
In this passage, Jesus is speaking to a religious leader who knows Jesus must be of God. Seeing love in the world is about God—not our own greatness.