Today’s Scripture Reading (March 29, 2018): 2 Peter 2
French Dramatist Jean Anouilh commented
that “there is love of course. And then
there’s life, it’s enemy.” So much of the
mundane things of life seems to drag us away from love. We get too busy to
love; too preoccupied with the things necessary for life to spend the time necessary
for love. We can give pretty speeches, we can argue that love is the answer
that this world needs to survive, and
then walk into the world and have that love stolen from us by the mundane
things that are part of life. We get lost in life and never find our way back
to love.
In the Christian Church, we have an ongoing argument on whether or not it is
possible to lose our salvation. The idea behind the argument is that if you
have truly known the love of God, is it possible to walk away from that love?
One side argues that it is not. If you have really
accepted the love God into your life, then you will never leave it. They state clearly that once you are saved, you will always be saved.
Who, knowing that kind of love could turn
their back on it.
The other side argues that it is possible to
walk away from God. They can cite many examples of Christians who did exactly
that. Those who argue that once you know the love of God, you cannot walk away say that these people never truly knew
God. But the second side disagrees. It is not that we live in perilous fear of
losing everything that we have gained in Christ; one mistake is not enough for
us to lose our salvation. But sometimes life gets in the way. Sometimes, moment
by moment, the mundane interferes with our experience of love. Anouilh was
right; life is the enemy of love. And over time we find that we no longer
remember the love that we once knew. We have walked away slowly, either of our own volition or because we have
been lured away by the mundane demands of life. But either way, we have lost
our salvation.
Peter argues that once you have turned away,
once the love that you had once known becomes just a dream, it is worse than if
you had never known that that kind of love ever existed. It is one thing to
fantasize about what does not exist and quite a different thing to have a
dream-like memory of something that you can’t seem to achieve once more in your
existence. Once life steals our knowledge of love, that love is almost
impossible to recapture.
Today is Maundy Thursday; the day before Good
Friday. The word Maundy is from the Latin “mandatum,”
a word from which we get the English word “mandate.” The origin of this Maundy Thursday
comes from the Last Supper Discourse in the Gospel of John - “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you,
so you must love one another. By this
everyone will know that you are my disciples,
if you love one another” (John 13:34-35). God who loves us gives us the mandate to share that love. The
task is harder than we sometimes believe. Too often life once more gets in our
way. But this is not a suggestion; it is
a command – go and love.
So Welcome to Maundy Thursday. I do not doubt that life will attempt to stop you
from your task today, but love anyway because
the truth is that for those who have lost their way, the only path back is to
experience that love once more in their lives. And this is the mandate
of the church; to love when love is hard, and to show those who have lost their
love to the demands of life that there is a way back to God. And love is that
way.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: 2 Peter 3
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