Monday, September 29, 2008

Fingerprints of Love/ Persecution

If you are a DNA evidence technician you have to ask yourself what are the fingerprints of love? Is it a healed heart? A kind word? An honest, yet gentle answer?

And to love, does that make you weak, as some have implied when they said, "Jesus is strong, not weak."

By having to make that statement, it seems as if we have somehow missed the point of love, compassion, and strength.

Is a man weaker because he exercises restraint against a man he know he can injure in order to demonstrate compassion, or is he stronger because he obliterates his enemy in the name of justice?

The bible doesn't seem to give a definitive answer, but one scripture speaks to me, " I desire mercy and not sacrifice."

Mercy is the foundation of God's love.

Yet as a friend pointed out to me, love is one of the most abused words ever given breath. People beat people in the name of love. Kill in the name of love. Belittle in the name of love. Use the words when the heart is so far from it.

After all the ultimate form of love is God's grace, which can be defined as unmerited favor that looks beyond the fault and sees the need.

So when we love, we are required to demonstrate the same love to others as God demonstrated to us through grace. This is no easy thing.

There are some people in this world who will hate you because you love them. Today, I discovered that.

The more you love them, the worse they respond. They hate you worse for loving them than they would've hated you if you'd hated them. It is almost as if people expect hate. Hate has become synonymous with human nature.

It isn't really because they hate you. It is because they hate themselves.

And because they hate themselves they will only, naturally, hate you. Sometimes I wonder if people are so twisted inside and feel so unworthy of love if they will not hate the person who loves them.

I find it ironic that the bible said that God is love. Jesus was killed not because he attempted to usurp the world in a violent coup, but because he told the world that God loved them enough to forgive them. Jesus said that if people loved the father, they would love him.

But people hated Jesus. They hated him because he challenged their beliefs. They hated that he had power to heal the sick. They hated him because he wasn't rich. They hated him because they wanted to be him. They hated him because he hung with low class people. They hated his ideas.

And as the scripture says, "They hated me without cause."

In the last 12 hours of Jesus' life many people wondered what was the truth about this man, labeled a blasphemer, a rebel, and a monster. And what is truth? That is the question Pilate, a purely political bureaucrat ultimately asks.

Even Pilate said "I find no fault in this man."

Yet, the son of God himself hung on a cross bearing the sins of all humanity, and the abject object of the world's hatred out of pure love.

John 15:18-19 "if the world hates you, know that it hated me before it hated you..."

2000 years later People still mistake kindness for weakness. They will do everything in their power to tear you down in the name of God and goodness to justify the fact that they don't want to lose their power. They will mock you. They will treat you wrong. They will hurt you in the name of love.

It is hard to love people who don't want love. They want power. They want influence. They want what you have. But offer them love, and you earn their spite.

The saddest part of this is, the thing that will heal that ugly hole that seems to suck life out of everything they encounter is only filled by the thing they seek to destroy.

God's antidote for hate is more love. He commands us, not suggests to us that loving our enemies is the only way that we can show that we are His children. It is our spiritual fingerprint.

Why? If love in a hate filled world is so aching why on earth would a just God demand that we continue to give it in the face of the most awful consequences?

Maybe, just maybe there is something about love, that overcomes hate not in the reaction of the hater, but the action of the person of the lover. That's why people who believe in justice have problems with grace, and love. Love appears unjust, on a universal level because it is something that none of us earned from God, yet because it is the ultimate victor over hate, and the inner being of God himself, it is more just than justice.

There is no victory in hate. Ultimately hate dies. But love remains eternal.

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