His love is not over and above us, this servant king seeks but through coercion, a gentle loving, a prompting and longing from below. This opportunist seeks a voice through our vulnerability and weakness. Weakness, humiliation, vulnerability and brokenness; Ah! The currency of God, this will lead to a small window of opportunity. To not see Gods love in this, is to face the prospect of not seeing it again. To see his love here is at the same time to be completely and utterly floored by its shocking implications. This window calls us look! The cross destroys all notions of conditionality, destroys all notions of the ‘fine print’ or the ‘hidden clauses’ that some evangelicals have used as a final trump card, this is the love of a brooding contract god. The shocking implication is this; the strings of conditionality are ours alone, we can choose to hold, to release.
To relinquish, is to feel the full force of his weight as a gentle tug. This puts to death the gospel of triumphant domination, of judgment now, with even worse to come, where God loves me so much, that I had better do something…. or else!! When we catch a glimpse of this reckless abandon, of waste extravagant, we will hold as if our very lives depend on it. To not have done this is to not have seen. Father! Forgive them for they no not what they do! Is a plea, one of complete and utter truth. Will we? Can we? Be held for what we have never seen. Maybe those of us who hold another view should at least be honest; a love that fails to win us, to hold us, may as well have never been love at all.
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