We began this series by looking at John’s overall purpose of revelation. By reading the Gospel of John, and considering the character of Jesus within, we can know God. Over the next three weeks, we will look at the Farewell Discourse in chapters 14-17 to see what John’s Jesus has to say about what it means to be church. Specifically, we will consider John’s understanding of love, friendship, and oneness. This week, love.
Love, like the Gospel of John, can seem abstract. It’s a deep well of emotions in which we swim and, at times, feel as though we might drown. There is responsibility and duty and desire. Precise definition slips away like the feelings of a sixth-grader at summer camp.
Though hard to define, love is where we live. We look for it in all the wrong places. We hunger for it. It’s thicker than water and it’s a burning thing. It has something to do with cats and muskrats. Love will humble us, shake us, and turn us around. It will conquer all and it will tear us apart. Whatever love is, it is lived on the ground, between the gravel and the limbs.
This problem of definition is not new. One might say that it is the central subject of the New Testament, of the whole Bible, perhaps even the primary task of humanity: to know what love is.
Please join us Sunday, 11am at the Kessler, as we discuss John’s proposal for the meaning of love and what that has to do with being a church.
Grace and Peace,
Scott