God’s Love Is Not Ridiculous

For the last few years we have ruined our post Easter joy, being gluttons for embarrassment and mortification, by listening to Chris Rosebrough’s Worst Easter Sermon Competition on Fighting for the Faith. The children gather around, full of uncertain wonder, and together we shudder through one terrible sermon after another. I think voting is open online if you want to weigh in. Most years the sermons are terrible enough to laugh over. But yesterday we listened to one that proved utterly depressing.

It was so depressing I went over and looked at the church’s website (I don’t want to link it, you’ll be happier that way) and found one of those welcome videos with music and testimonials announcing a sermon series or event of some kind. The music swelled, the shot panned wide, and then onto the screen was scrolled the intriguing claim that God’s love is ridiculous.

This declaration was meant to be a shocking good thing, of course. God’s love was first, and for a decently long time, amazing, then it became sort of scandalous, then, not too much later, crazy. Now though, it’s ridiculous. In the ever frantic effort to get anyone to think about God at all, the pastor, or whoever it might be, keeps the video camera in ship shape and labors intensely to find more and more provocative words to describe someone who has, at least in this culture, become rather old, tired, and boring. God may be love, but does it really matter? Will he give me a new car? Because otherwise what kind of love is it?

And so those inside of the church, but more and more the psuedo church, scroll through dictionary.com looking for synonyms of “amazing.” The search necessarily lands one on the word “ridiculous.” Before too much longer we will find that God’s love is “hilarious” and “grotesque.” And truly, a quick internet search will show you that many people already prefer those descriptors.

Seriously, though, the love of God is not ridiculous. It is not an absurdity that if you just stop and think about it enough your mind will be turned inside out and you’ll suddenly realize that the thing you are lacking is just a more intense and fantastical love that sweeps you away at least until you scrape up the money to go buy a kayak or a plane ticket to the Alhambra. “How crazy!” you say later. “I just did it, I just went deep sea diving for a week. It was amazing!”

God’s love is actually the sagacious underlying ordering of time, space, the universe, and the continuing breaths of all those people who wander around in the imaginations of their own hearts. There’s nothing ridiculous about it. It is rational, and, if you are inquiring at all, more than undersandable.

First of all, God’s love is sublimely relational, being trinitarian at its core. God, being eminently sensible, loves within the Godhead first and foremost. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit have lived forever, and will continue to do so, in perfect love, one for the other. The Father eternally and perfectly loves the Son and Holy Spirit, and the Son loves the Father, and so on and so forth. There isn’t any shadow of sin or selfishness in this love. It is perfect.

And then, which shouldn’t be very surprising, it is sacrificial. In loving providence, God created man in his own image. And women too. God, no matter what you may feel about it, is not a bigot. He created male and female in his likeness and gave them everything they needed. That is when the irrational, ridiculous portion entered in, the bit that, if you think about it a long time, does always feel fundamentally insensible, foolish, vain, and certainly grotesque and laughable. Those human creatures decided that the love and care of a perfect God was not that interesting after all, and that they would love themselves best, not as God loves, forever perfectly giving the self for the sake of the other, but in a grasping and pathetic way, loving the self more than anything.

God, then, in response to the rejection of his creatures, undertook to enact the same love that he has in himself, for the sake of his creation. The Father delievered up the Son to rescue his creation, and the Son emptied himself of everything for the sake of us, going even to death on a cross, so that we might be bought back from our treacherous insanity. This action was both loving and sane. And in spite of a corrupting and pervasive self love, the human person is often able to see that the love of another requires some level of self deinal, some emptying of the self, if only for a few minutes. Although it is increasinly hard for the modern person to even understand what that looks like or why it is a good thing, even in a human sense, without even trying to cast a jaundiced eye towards the heavens.

If you feel out of sorts and like you don’t know what to think or feel, go to church. An orderly, sensible, perfect love there awaits you. You’ll be able to see that you are the ridiculous one, but that God emptied himself of his majestic glory to regain and restore your mind. He’s not crazy, and you don’t have to be either.