Day Fifty - The Love of Christmas

“A bell is no bell until you ring it,

A song is no song until you sing it,

And love in your heart wasn’t put there to stay,

Love isn’t love, until you give it away”

A quotation by Oscar Hammerstein II reminds us that Love is not a theoretical concept but an action for someone else’s benefit.

Sundays in the Life-Light series are for contributions in the form of a Bible Study and as we light the fourth Advent candle we focus today on LOVE which is the reason (logos) for the Christmas season. Love came down at Christmas in a special birth, in a specific location, for a particular purpose. The Scriptures tell us that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Tim 1:15)

And why ?

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal Life” (John 3:16 NRSV)

In the Greek language, in which John was writing, there are several words that cover the English word ‘love’. Eros is the term for romantic attraction, Philia for friendship and Agape for a love that puts someone else’s needs first. In this verse the Greek word Agape is used in the past one-off occurrence tense ‘loved’.

Translations can subtly alter a meaning by changing the word order as in the original Greek our text today would read “For thus loved God the world that…..” which means the writer is directing us with the words ‘For thus’ to the preceding passage with which to make a comparison. So, let’s look at that.

In the verse beforehand Jesus reminds the Jewish readers of the episode of the Valley of the Scorpions we read about in Numbers 22:8&9 when he says “And as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness”. The released slaves had begun to grumble about the manna and so were besieged by snakes and yet God provided a way of escape, not from the snakes but from the effects of the deadly venom of the snake-bite. How? God told the leader Moses to carve a bronze snake and erect it on a pole and if the Israelites got bitten by a snake and obeyed God’s command to look at the lifted-up snake and believed in God’s promise of healing, then they would escape certain death.

If we continue to look at the previous passage it continues “So must the Son of man be lifted up”. In this way Jesus is highlighting a link between the obedience to believe in the snake-pole cure in their cultural narrative, and those who would believe in his own death on the cross as the escape from sin’s destructive power. The subtle reference to God’s victory over the serpent of the Genesis saga cannot be missed in these passages. The New Testament writers certainly help us to see that ‘The New is in the Old concealed and the Old is in the New revealed.’

Therefore, we realize that in studying the text in its original language, the ‘so’ English translation actually should mean in the same manner, as something already alluded to. The common misconception of understanding this verse as God loving the world “so much” is brought about by English language translation word-order of “God so loved”.

God’s love then, incarnated at Christmas, is about LOVE IN ACTION, at great cost to God. We as humans, being reborn into that Kingdom of Love, are not immune from birth-pangs either, as Simeon prophesied to a pregnant Mary “…and a sword will pierce your own soul too.”(Luke 2:35)

Therefore, however ghastly 2020 has been, LOVE DIVINE is the reason Christians are not cancelling Christmas this year. God’s Love, wrapped in swaddling clothes of sorrow, brings eternal and abundant life to ‘everyone who believes in him’ (continuous present tense in Greek) and that is definitely worth celebrating with a Happy Christmas wish to the whole world.

Thank you God for Jesus - the greatest gift ever.

Elisabeth Sweeney-Smith