Lent and the Love of God

This week's Lent post is a response to the thoughts of Metacrock at his personal blog: Love: the Basis of Everything (expansion). Metacrock and I have several beliefs in common; the most important of those is that love is the core of God's nature. We find ourselves in agreement that love, as the nature of God, is the cause of creation and the basis of morality. More than that, we share common ground that love is the basis of morality because love is the basis of creation, and because it is the nature of God. God is the ground of existence; the ground of existence is love.

If the basis of our existence is the love of God, then breaking all ties with God amounts to cutting off the branch on which we sit. It's a fatal move, not because of some whimsical rule-system or vindictive payback, but because of the nature of our existence as contingent on God.


At one point Jesus told a parable describing God's love for people: a shepherd went looking for a missing sheep. In our days of city-dwelling and dwindling wilderness we do not think of the risk the shepherd would take to seek out a lost sheep. The wild was a dangerous place not just for the sheep, but possibly for the shepherd too.

Today marks the start of Holy Week: in the context of our broken relationship with God, it calls back to the time when Jesus knowingly stepped onto dangerous ground. Why did he have to die? Death is where all the missing sheep had gone, or would someday go.