Grace and Peace, Bethesda!
Truly He taught us to love one another; His law is love and His Gospel is Peace | Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brothers; And in His name, all oppression shall cease
—”O Holy Night” Third Stanza
The law of Christ is love, as Paul well knew and reminded the Roman churches, “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law (Romans 13:8).”
Love is a beautiful thing, yes. But love is not quite the gospel.
Love might be the best thing going in the old world. But love is not the gospel.
Peter was right to say, “Love covers a multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4:8). But love is not the gospel that entirely removes sin and its wages of death. Love does not raise the dead. Love does not make all things new. Love is not even unique to Christianity or to religious belief in general.
We need more than love and the inspiration to be kinder people. The law of love is never satisfied, not in reality and not in our conscience. We could always be more loving. We are well aware of how our loves fall short. We struggle to love our enemies. We may even struggle to find love for ourselves. We are certainly far from loving like Jesus.
We need more than love. We need peace. We need world-wide shalom. We need righteousness. And we receive this as a gift on account of Christ. Peace comes freely from the Gospel of Christ for you. The cooing child who became the crucified savior, who now speaks to his flock from the resurrection-side of the grave. “Peace be with you. Receive the Holy Spirit. Your sins are forgiven.” The faithfulness of Jesus in the face of human lovelessness won for us salvation, life eternal, peace forever.
The holidays have this magical ability to enlarge even a grinch’s heart. But remember the grinch did not cause his own heart to grow. He was not saved by a new-found ability to love more deeply. It was the witness of a little child and the overwhelming song of Who-Ville echoing out of the valley of loss that washed over the grinch with mercy and pardon.
“We love because He first loved us “ (1 John 4:19). We love because we are loved. We make peace because He is our peace. We welcome the oppressed as brothers, because He has shattered all chains. The advent of Christ is the end of fear. He has come. He is coming again. All shall be well.
Shalom,
Pastor Tom