God Is Love, All the Way Down

Peter's letter had gone out to God's scattered people, and now another old fisherman sat down to write. His name was John. Long ago he had mended nets by the lake with his brother James. (That was a different James from Jesus' own brother, who wrote a letter of his own.) Now his hair was white.

John's church family was in trouble. Some people had walked out of it. "We know God better than any of you," they said, with their noses in the air. They said Jesus had never really come as a man with a real body. And on their way out the door, they did not seem to love anybody very much.

The people who stayed were mixed up and frightened. Who was right? Did God still love them?

So John wrote to them. He called the grandfathers and bakers in that church his "dear children." (When you are as old as John, nearly everyone looks young.)

"Dear friends," he wrote, "let us love one another, because love comes from God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love."

Then John showed them how they could be sure God loved them. "This is how God showed his love," he wrote. "He sent his one and only Son into the world, so that we could live through him."

The love started on God's side. "This is love," John wrote. "We did not love God first. He loved us, and sent his Son to be the sacrifice for our sins." A sacrifice is something given up in someone else's place. Jesus died on the cross in the place of people who had done wrong, and John had stood beside that cross.

So God's love goes deeper than anyone can dig. Underneath every good thing God does there is love, and underneath that love there is more of it, and when you reach the very bottom, it is still love.

Some of John's dear children lay awake worrying about the day God would judge the world. Would he be angry with them?

"There is no fear in love," John wrote. "Perfect love drives fear out." Fear is what you feel when a punishment is coming. God's love chases it off the way a grandmother with a broom chases a mouse out the kitchen door. Out you go! Shoo!

"We love," John wrote, "because he loved us first."

A few lines earlier, John had written something surprising: "No one has ever seen God." God cannot be looked at the way the moon can.

But John had seen something. He had watched Jesus kneel and wash his friends' dirty feet. After the cross, John saw him come through a locked door to where those friends hid in fear. "Peace be with you," Jesus said. Anyone who looked at Jesus was watching God's love walk in where frightened people were hiding.

"If we love one another," John wrote, "God lives in us." Every time Jesus' people forgive and share and look after each other, that same love shows up again.

The people who walked out said Jesus never had a real body. John had touched him. He had seen Jesus' hands, before the nails and after them, and those hands showed what God is like all the way down.