7.13.2005

Page 194

This be the devo that I mentioned in the post immediately below:

Have you ever been sexually aroused to an intense degree? Really stimulated in a sensuous way? Passionately turned on? Both the scriptuer and the liturgy of the Christian community say that human sexual is but a pale imitation of God's passion for his people. That is why human love, though it's the best image we have, is still an inadequate image of God's love. Not because it overdoes it, but because human desire with all it's emotion cannot compare with the passionate yearning of Jesus Christ. That is why saints can only stutter and stammer about the reality, why Blaise Pascal on his famous night of fire, November 21, 1654, could not speak a word, why Bede Griffith wrote: "The love of Jesus Christ is not a mild benevolence: it is a consuming fire."

It is only the revelation that God is love that clarifies the happy irrationality of God's conduct and his relentless pursuit. For love tends to be irrational. It pursues in spite of infidelity. The Gospel account of the cleansing of the Temple tells us that sometimes love blossoms into jealousy and anger. Jesus' anger reveals his keen interest, his frantic involvement in his brothers and sisters coming into the right relationship with Abba God.


So if we are to love like Christ, we have to love with reckless abandon and total irrationality. And we can't do that. We are incapable of doing that. But we can try. And sometimes it's hard. But we have to try. Here's a verse to think about:
And now, O Israel, what does the LORD your God ask of you but to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.
Deuteronomy 10:12

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