Keith’s Blog

True love Doesn't Wait

Many of us are all too familiar with unrequited love. The sense of sorrow, the searing anguish, the downright hurt and pain of giving ourselves in love for another but never knowing what it feels like for that love to be returned.

I’ve known it in my own life on several occasions and in different spheres. I’ve also watched its terrible consequences in the lives of many of my friends and congregational members. Particularly in our teens and twenties, such unreflected, unreciprocated love can ruin many an evening and interrupt many a good night’s sleep. Our whole bodies, never mind our hearts, can ache and reel when we love but are not loved in return.

This week I’ve been thinking about how easily God’s love is unrequited in our lives. We are his children, his delight. It was for us that Jesus left the comfortable intimacy of the Father’s side and suffered so awfully in the Easter passion. It is to us that his death and resurrection now proclaim his favour, his victory and his love. And yet, how many of us go through life, are going through life right now, without ever even realising, never mind responding to how much we are loved by the God who created us?

Jesus’ great parable of the two lost sons in Luke 15 makes it clear to us that we can hide from God just as effectively in the church as we can outside of it. For centuries, of course, we have totally missed the point of this most famous of bible passages by contenting ourselves with calling it the parable of the lost or prodigal son. But Jesus simply begins, ‘A man had two sons.’ And both are equally lost.

Like most of us, Jesus’ audience that day were mainly ‘church-going’ people and, for such, the younger’s flight from his Father’s affection was naturally easy to compute. In open rebellion, he has demanded his share, fled the coup to immorality, and has sadly reaped the consequences of his own self-centredness and pride. As Jesus’ religious hearers listened in, it was easy for them (and us) to see how the Father’s compassion and mercy was needed by this wayward son who for some strange reason, seemed not to want it

It is the second part of the story that caused them, and causes us, all the problems. For, just as we murmur our approval of the younger brother’s need for repentance and restoration, Jesus comes at us out of the sun and hits us with our own need for the same.

Like us, the older brother has stayed. The older brother has served and obeyed. And yet, as Jesus’ ending makes so clear, he has fled just as determinedly from his Father’s affection and has become just as certainly and even more entrenchedly lost! Rebellion, Jesus says, can just as devastatingly be into religion and self-righteousness as it can into immorality and self-centredness. We can flee just as hurriedly and foolishly from our Father’s affection while staying put at home all the time.

But judgement is not the purpose of the parable. Jesus is not revealing the sin of either brother in order to demonstrate how much they deserve to be condemned. His point is that they are both lost and yet they are both still wholeheartedly loved.

Where are we in the story? Whether our rebellion has been in immorality or in religion, in self-centredness or in self-righteousness, the Easter message proclaims the most startling and liberated truth we can ever hear… We are loved! We are accepted! And we need only to requite, to receive what is so powerfully offered in the cross of Christ, to discover what this true love we have always been seeking is actually about.

Why would we wait any longer?