After reading through what I wrote in the previous reflection, another thought came to me. In a recent discussion (this time in a teaching session with a number of people), someone asked “how can we love the unlovable?”
Having spent some time on 1 John 4, I responded saying that we should go back to the the Gospel and to God and come to appreciate how he has loved us “while we were yet sinners”. I recalled Jesus’ parable about the person who owed a huge sum of money to the king but was forgiven but was unwilling to forgive someone who owed him a much smaller sum.
‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ (Matthew 18)
We need to appreciate how much we have been forgiven (and loved) by God so that we have the resources to forgive (and love) a fellow man.
“But no matter how much I show love to the person, the person never changes. It is an exercise in futility,” came the response.
There again is our fixation on outcomes.
Perhaps the person misunderstood love as pandering to the person’s desires and overlooking the person’s misdeeds. This is not the way God loves. At the same time though we are not to understand that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son because he felt that the outcome is worth his sacrifice. He did so because this is what love does.
“We love because he first loved us,” writes John. It is the right response to the love of God, rather than an action to achieve an outcome.