Now, if you're like the rest of us, you sort of wait for the power to come back on, but there's a thing that happens, which is that if all the power goes out, and you're left in the darkness, you don't just sort of curl up and wait, you probably go to bed, and rest up for a night. You can do this because you know your house well enough to not have to hide in the darkness and wait for the morning. If the lights go out, it's inconvenient, but it's not a deal breaker as far as living your life. That you can do whether or not the lights are on. You can be fine with that all the time, because you're not a stranger in your own home, and you know it better than you think you do. I would wager that even if you couldn't tell me how many stairs go down to the basement in your own home, you could manage your stairs even blindfolded, because even if you don't know it, your brain does.
This is because you're not a stranger in that space. You spend every day there, you move in and out of that space with ease and rapidity. You have molded that space to your desires, and you can move effortlessly through it, with very few problems beyond the odd stubbed toe, that sort of thing.
The longer you abide in a space, the easier it is to get around in it, and after a while, you have a connection to the place that you don't even need to see it anymore. In the Gospel reading, Jesus tells us that we are to abide in God's love. And abiding in God's love is a matter of working out what God's love actually is, before you can start to live there. Think of it like knowing what your address is, knowing where you live, and all that, before you can claim to live there. And people who have a passing idea about God's love don't actually abide in it. They visit it, sure, like a hotel, but think about a hotel, about how a hotel works, or a showhome, that kind of thing. Those places are there as spaces in which everyone can see themselves, places in which absolutely anyone can picture themselves staying for a while, but not living. Your house, your actual home, is formed and molded around you, molded to your life, your needs, your desires, the way you move through your day. People visit God's love in that way, expecting it to be like a hotel room or a showhome, looking like it could apply to anyone, but actually applying to nobody. If you actually abide in God's love, though, you will find that it definitely applies to real people. And once you understand that it applies to real people, then you will also understand that it applies to you.
That's part of the reason why you should read the Old Testament, you know. If you read through the Old Testament, you will get a feeling for what God's love actually is, and it's not generic, not bland. It's specific, because it applies to people, and that's the history of Israel. God's love is active, it is vibrant, and it applies directly to people, to human beings, and it isn't always what you want, you know. Honestly, you probably don't want anyone to really genuinely love you actively; you want people to love you passively. Passive love is a love in which you are loved through a lack of correction: if someone loved you, they'd leave you alone, wouldn't bother you anymore. When we're teenagers, we want our parents to love us passively, not actively. We want them to love us by leaving us alone, baking us casseroles, but not actually engaging with wanting us to be different than we currently are. We want them to feed, house, and clothe us, but not to move beyond that at all. But the love of God isn't a passive love, it's an active love, that wants you to be different than you are. It wants you to be different, to move beyond where you are and what you are up to. The love of God that we abide in is the one in which he tells us to love one another actively, as he loves us actively. This brings us up against Matthew 25, in which the passive love, the laid back going nowhere love, that love is what leads to you being on the left, with the goats. It's what leads to you being cut off from the paradise prepared from the foundation of the world, given that you had a thousand opportunities to do the right thing, to choose to accomplish what is good and proper, and chose not to do it, believing that the best love you can offer to the world is passive, does not insist on itself, does not try to hard nor go too far, but just doesn't interfere.
To love one another as Christ loves us is to lay down our lives for one another, to seek to serve, to do what we can to ensure the life of our neighbor is preserved, to see the hungry, the thirsty, the poor, the naked, and to look out for all their needs, that sort of thing. That's what Christ did, to move through the world, ministering to those who were around him, those who need healing and peace, who need to be raised from the dead and to have their sins forgiven, all those things are what Christ did, and did tirelessly. And I would ask you if you love people like that? Do you love people in the way the Christ loves you, giving himself up for you? Do you give your life to others an hour, a minute at a time? Are these things that you do constantly, or do you avoid those things and think about your time, your resources as being phenomenally important all the time? Do you give of yourself tirelessly as Jesus did, or do you squeeze charity and mercy in and around all the other important things you have to do in a day?
There's a real chance that you're nowhere near as active in your love for the poor, for the miserable, for the needy who surround you as you believe other people should be, and this is where the rubber hits the road for the Christian faith. Most people would change their definition of what is good based on what they are doing already - if you're doing it, then it's good. But the Christian definition isn't based on you being good by definition, but rather it is based on the goodness of Christ. He wants you to love others as he has loved you, which is tiring, and exhausting to say the least. But there is one other key way in which he loved you, and it's what you need to know the most about. Not just what he did in service to people, but in forgiveness for when they did not. And this is so key that it can't be overstated. When Jesus tells you what you need to do, and you know that it is right from the beginning, you need to ask yourself why you don't do it. Is it right, and if it is right, is it important? If the answer to both of those questions is yes, which it is, then you have to deal with the reality that you are not doing these things that you think all people should do. And if this is the case, and the commands of Jesus are good, then you have to repent, and be forgiven. And if you can be forgiven, then you can forgive others as well. You aren't going to serve other people perfectly, the way Christ does, you're not going to love others perfectly as Christ loves you, but you can forgive them, as Christ has forgiven you. And here's something strange that you need to think about.
To love one another as Christ loves you means you have to abide in Christ's love to understand how he loves you. How does he love you, fellow Christian? The same way he loves me, which is that he forgives me. And to forgive me, he had to lay down his life on the cross, to suffer the spear and the nails, the crown of thorns and the inevitable death. This is the cost of your forgiveness, and this is how Christ's love is exhibited to you in the here and now. And as it is exhibited to you in this way in the here and now, this is how you are to love one another. But make no mistake, to love one another as Christ loves you, to forgive one another as Christ has forgiven you, that hurts, and it will absolutely require you to lay down your life for those people. To hold onto a grudge, that's the easy part. To forgive, to renew a relationship, that requires you to lay down your life day by day. It requires you to in a sense let go of your own desires, your own will, and to seriously contemplate that God's will for you is of vital importance. He wants you to give yourself up, and in doing so, you will understand something that you forgot a long time ago. That there is a lot in you that needs to be forgiven, to be absolved, and when you know that, and how much it took to forgive you, then you may very well begin to understand how you love one another. Forgiving them as Christ forgave you.
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