December 27, 2022

Luke 2: 6, 7 (NIV)

While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn son.

. . . love so profound, so utterly magnificent, that it cannot be defined, only demonstrated.*

From another room, I could hear a baby crying on the television and the thought came to me: That’s what Jesus sounded like when he was born. In spite of what we may have been led to believe through Christmas songs ("little Lord Jesus no crying he makes"), the newborn Jesus cried, spit up, and kept his parents awake at night. Indeed, he was a real baby.

Babies are so precious, and as parents we want to protect them and ensure a good future for them. Yet at the birth of his Son, God had to stand by while his baby met his destiny. Although he could be proud of his Son’s accomplishments as he grew in wisdom and stature and favor with God and man, there was always that cloud of future tragedy surrounding him.

I don’t have much in common with God the Supreme Being, but as God the Father, his pain makes him one of us. I can imagine the anguish of watching my beloved child suffer and die. But that’s where our common ground ends because I cannot imagine sacrificing one of my sons for the sake of some unworthy, undeserving sinner. How could God love me and the rest of humanity that much? In the garden before his arrest, Jesus prayed for a way out of what he was about to face. If he wanted to escape that horrible death, how much must God have wanted to deliver him from it?

You think you know what love is? Ha. God is love? We need a different word for what God is. What we call “love” is selfish and powerless. What do you call it when the Father turned his back on his Son as he hung on the cross? 

“Love” is the best our language has to offer . . . and so we live with it.

It is [its] very irrationality that gives the gospel its greatest defense.
For only God could love like that.*