Not Stagnant, but Active, Love
Every year around October, people start asking how my Christmas shopping is going, and there’s always one mum who proudly announces that she’s already finished (months before Christmas!). Needless to say, some people get very invested in Christmas, maybe because they correlate their efforts with the level of love others will feel, or perhaps because they want the type of love displayed in Christmas movies where the whole event is magical.
Either way, most people reflect on love at this time of year, which made me think about Jesus. Because, although not all parents start preparing for the arrival of Christmas months before the event, most parents start preparing for the arrival of babies well in advance…,
Can you imagine what the first Christmas would have been like for Mary and Joseph? They were preparing for their first child while also knowing that he was the son of God! Wild right? Only instead of trying to find presents or decide what food they would eat (or what family dramas might unfold), they were trying to find a safe place for their beloved son Jesus to be born…WOW!
Love is one of the most complicated concepts in our society, with variations in definitions as much as interpretations. Literature, music, and movies usually explore loves meaning in relation to emotions and experiences. For the most part, it's explained as a feeling, but if you asked a couple who have been married for over thirty years, they would tell you that love is so much more than a simple feeling. Sayings like “I love them so much I want to shout it from the rooftops” feed the idea that love should convey this level of emotional response, and if it doesn’t, then it mustn’t be real love… however, the feeling of loving something so much it causes a physical action also occurs when you eat something delicious, but I'm pretty sure you're not in-love with cake… you see, feelings are only one part of the human experience, and while they are amazing, they will fade and change with familiarity. (If you don’t believe me, spend a month eating your favourite food for every meal or listening to your favourite song every day, and I guarantee your feelings will change).
Luke 1-2 tells the account of Jesus' birth, where love is highlighted in the way individuals choose to act in response to God, family, and community; here, the language focuses on convictions where trust, merged with hope, aligns humanity to God's divine plans. We tend to associate love with happiness, but the two terms are not interchangeable.
I once was told to read my emails out loud before sending them unbeknown to me; my directness could be misunderstood as rudeness; the shift in context between what we think and what we do is crucial when communicating with others or even ourselves, but it’s something we often miss. When communicating in the written format, information can be influenced by our assumptions of the content, a good way to test this is by shifting the point of view; for example, when I get a negative email or text, I sing it out loud to the melody of my favourite song, as the music stirs happy emotions I can easily discern what parts of the written content are actually negative versus my assumptions. Similarly, whenever my bible says something is a song, I make up a melody and sing it aloud, which often helps me understand the text differently.
I encourage you to do this with Mary's song (Luke 1:46-55); when doing this, I felt it connected in such a powerful way that Mary's conviction and passionate proclamation of God's love and her own were almost tangible.
I think this is why God's love found in scripture highlights its active nature; love is more than a feeling it’s a conviction, a choice to trust, to endure, to hope… within this definition of love, the things we tell ourselves and the way we act matter.
In Mark 12:28-34 Jesus tells everyone that the greatest commandment is to Love God with all that they are and then to love their neighbours as themselves; someone who hears this clarifies that Jesus is prioritising this love above their sacrifices and offering, Jesus not only confirms this is correct but positions this person near the Kingdom of God as a result. This verse links to Deut 6:4-12, where these commandments of love are crucial to God's community as a signpost to guide his people into the promised land, highlighting that this blessing is not earned by his people but freely given by its creator.
The cool thing is that although both passages speak to different times and cultures with different languages (agapaó in Greek, aheb in Hebrew), both use the same word, which is classified as a Verb conveying an active love reminding me that love doesn’t happen to me it's not stagnant on the contrary, it's active, and I get to be invested in it.
This tells me that God's love is crucial for people to grasp a deeper understanding and investment of humanity in all its glory, which goes beyond feelings or the stories we tell ourselves; rather, when we actively love, this positions us into God's kingdom on earth. So, this Christmas, I encourage you to join me in choosing what role we might play in this. No matter how we ‘feel’, God has the power to transform every single person, and we can choose to be part of his kingdom by actively loving God in obedient worship, ourselves through self-compassion, and how we treat others.
#Godslove #christmas #transformation #worship #activelove