“Jesus, Be Our Light of Love” by Christopher Y. on Dec. 21, 2025

I offered to share at one of the Advent readings, and I probably should have paid more attention to the selection process, because if I had picked one, it would not have been a meditation on God’s love. Perhaps this seems strange as it must be the commonest component of Sunday school lessons. But it is precisely the depth and breadth of the topic which feels overwhelming to me. Where to start? However, as with many things, the hardest things are often the most rewarding. I am grateful for the opportunity to dabble even a little in the theme of the “Light of God’s Love”. As with many things, we strive with human words to grasp at truths far too big for us to hold on to. Thank you for letting me fumble in the darkness a little with you today.  I would like to begin by reading more of the 1 John 4 reading we did for the lighting of the candle.

7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

13 This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. 14 And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. 15 If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. 16 And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.

God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. 17 This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. 18 There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

19 We love because he first loved us. 20 Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. 21 And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.

In Advent, we are reflecting on the coming of the second person of the Trinity, God the Son. This passage from 1 John illustrates this so beautifully and mysteriously. But before we get to Jesus, we start with a three word summary that perhaps some of us, myself included, have heard so many times that its revolutionary quality is a little lost on us. John does not start with God loving, he starts with God’s being. God. Is. Love. I will be quoting from C.S. Lewis’s book “The Four Loves” as I found his exploration of the selfless “Agape” love of God very helpful in reflecting on this passage. “We begin at the real beginning, with love as the Divine energy. This primal love is Gift-love. In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give. The doctrine that God was under no necessity to create, is not a piece of dry scholastic speculation. It is essential…God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them.”

During the Advent season of the Church calendar, we reflect on the mystery of Jesus, God in the flesh, born a tiny little vulnerable child. In a few nights, we will read through the Christmas story and marvel at the miracle of God Incarnate. But we cannot meditate on the birth of the Christ without also looking that short 33 years ahead to what comes next. In 1 John 4, 9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 

Lewis writes that God shows his love to us through his Son, through becoming fully man, knowing full well what it will cost: “He creates this universe, already…seeing the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath’s sake hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a “host” who deliberately creates his own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and “take advantage of” Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves.”

John exhorts us in verse 7:   “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God.”

In verse 11, “Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”

And in verse 19: “We love because he first loved us.”

John emphasizes that our response to God’s love, our response to God pouring himself out for humanity, is that we must accept his unconditional love into ourselves and then radiate that love outwards.  Lewis writes that in order to embrace his love we must discard the idea that we deserve it. If we cling to the idea that God’s love is dependent on our lovability, we miss the opportunity to fully experience the radical nature of His independent regard. I remember having a conversation with someone in our co-housing building about the community Thanksgiving potluck, and we stumbled accidentally onto the topic of gratitude for love unearned. For her, that idea of unconditional love seemed condemnatory, and it implied that we are too terrible to love and she bristled at that idea. However, I think for all of us that have experienced the crush of running into our limitations, our shrivelled capacity to love, the relief of a love that needs nothing from us can be transformative. Lewis writes: 

“For all the time this illusion to which nature clings as her last treasure, this pretense that we have anything of our own or could for one hour retain by our own strength any goodness that God may pour into us, has kept us from being happy. We have been like bathers who want to keep their feet - or one foot - or one toe - on the bottom, when to lose that foothold would be to surrender themselves to a glorious tumble in the surf. The consequences of parting with our last claim to intrinsic freedom, power or worth, are real freedom power and worth, really ours just because God gives them and because we know them to be (in another sense) not ‘ours’.”

If we have been forgiven all, if we have been loved by the maker of the universe in such a fashion that he would humble himself to our material world, to the privations and depredations of being human, then how can we not let that shine outwards? 1 John makes this incongruity clear in verse 20: “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. 21 And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.”

As Christ’s example shows, this love is not without cost. 

“We follow One who wept over Jerusalem and at the grave of Lazarus, and , loving all, yet had one disciple whom, in a special sense, he “loved.” Even if it were granted that insurance against heartbreak were our highest wisdom, does God Himself offer them? Apparently not. Christ comes at last to say “Why hast thou forsaken me?” 

There is no escape…there is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies, and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket -safe, dark, motionless, airless- it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love, is Hell.”

In light of this, let us exhort ourselves once more with the words of 1 John 4 verse 7:

“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.”