The Power Of Love In A Culture Of Violence Series

NEW LOVE ETHIC

What is the impetus that is motivating Jesus to command this new love ethic? He confirms that we must embrace this radical form of love as a path towards our rightful position as God’s children (v. 45). We are to love our neighbors and our enemies precisely because that is how God loves. Verse 45 states that God makes the “sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” God’s indiscriminate love for God’s creation is our example. As children of God, we are called to emulate the characteristics of the Creator in our thoughts, words, and actions.

The Church can be much more proactive in sermons and church programs and in partnerships with parents, schools, and social service agencies in lessening youth violence. Too few in number are the churches that INTENTIONALLY promote nonviolence. A sermon on the subject after another child dies due to gang or drug-related violence is so inadequate. Youth programs that mainly concentrate on teaching Bible verses and abstinence-related behaviors are woefully inadequate. We need to get real and get serious because, as Harry Belefonte stated, the streets are being bathed with the blood of our babies.

Our God is a God of action. God did not teach love of the other as some abstract concept and expect the world to catch the vision. Instead God acted. Loving us enough to send us a Savior for our redemption in spite of our constant inhumane acts one to another, God continues to extend mercy to us when our acts and thoughts of violence merit justice. This is our clarion call to give what we have received. So, whether as young adults, parents, pastors, teachers, elders in the village, members of the media, athletes, or blue-collar or white-collar professionals, it’s our time to stand up in our corners of the world and help stop the violence. This is our day. This day we get to decide what will we do with INTENTIONALITY from this point forward to be part of the Jesus army that saves children from being instruments of violence.

CONCLUSION

Jesus uses his radical love ethic as a conduit for transforming communities through reconciliation and love. As Howard Thurman notes, “the concern for reconciliation finds expression in the simple human desire to understand others and to be understood by others.”3 Even in light of contemporary youth violence, hope still abides in the power of an informed and intentional love ethic. This dynamic of love empowers us to move beyond the division that violence creates towards the power to uplift and the ability to see the other through the same lenses of love through which God see us.

For God looked beyond our fault and saw our need. If God hadn’t loved us: we would be lost, we would be down and out, destitute and despondent, we would be drifting like a ship without a sail, but he loved us to life, He loved us to wholeness, he loved us in spite of: in spite of our ways, in spite of our habits, in spite of our proclivities, in spite of our attitudes, in spite of our lies, in spite of our slothfulness, in spite of our unfaithfulness, in spite of our wickedness…He loved us.