The perfection of God's love

Some Christians talk as though they think God's perfection is a threat to us: they preach fear of God. They preach God as demanding perfection. They preach God as holy and just and absolutely perfect -- at everything except love. A loveless god is absolutely a threat to us; a loveless god is indistinguishable from a demon.

Have you ever watched a movie and tried to figure out what sets apart the good guys from the bad guys, and see if that's a window back into our own world in the way we'd hope from a good story? To become the hero, it's not the superpowers, or the extent of the power; in any interesting contest, both sides are formidable. It's not whether they have some sense of morality (and all moralities are equal); the "bad guys" are often convinced they're in the right, both in movies and in the real world. Often the difference is love in the sense of that human connection, whether one side recognizes that the other side is comprised of human beings who are worthy of love and compassion. If any group is written off as irredeemable, not worth knowing, not fully sane or not fully human, then atrocities are not far behind. Someone with a lot of power but without love is not the hero but the villain. And so I'd say it again: a loveless god is indistinguishable from a demon.

Thank God that he defines himself by his love, his mercy, his compassion. Thank God that he defines himself by how much he loves us, even while we were still his enemies. It's a wake-up call in that he calls us specifically to love our enemies too, to stop judging each other and condemning each other and devouring each other. As God loves his own enemies, he takes away any excuse for us to use his name to justify bad treatment of our own enemies.

"God so loved the world" -- the followers of Jesus read that today during Lent, those vast numbers of us who follow the common lectionary: God's motive, his reason for the cross. It's not about some judgmental perfectionism, not about his righteous anger. Our hope is in his perfect love. We trust him in the cross because it is there that we see, even as we suffer too: God is not the villain.