Unconditional Love

The United Reformed Church's National Synod of Scotland expresses its vision through a series of affirmations. I would like to explore these in turn, so this article reflects on the first aspiration. As a Synod we aspire to demonstrate unconditional love. We are an active Christian community which responds to the UNCONDITIONAL LOVE of God through celebrating the Christian Story in ways that bring meaning and hope to life. We seek to support each other in faith and doubt through caring. Martin Luther King, in his little book of sermons Strength to Love helps us understand what this means when he draws a clear link between love and forgiveness and with particular reference to Jesus’ exhortation that we should love our enemies, perhaps one of the most difficult standards that Jesus set. We tend rather to be people of revenge and find this call to unconditional love extremely challenging. Yet we need to take seriously our regular prayer, every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer: forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us (Luke 11:4). King writes: Forgiveness does not mean ignoring what has been done or putting a false label on an evil act. It means, rather, that the evil act no longer remains as a barrier to the relationship. Forgiveness is a catalyst creating the atmosphere necessary for a fresh start and a new beginning. It is the lifting of a burden or the cancelling of a debt. …. Forgiveness means reconciliation, a coming together again. Without this, no one can love their enemies. The degree to which we are able to forgive determines the degree to which we are able to love our enemies. Nobody should pretend that unconditional love is easy. However, it is a critical part of the relationship that Jesus calls us to have with each other. I think we can be helped towards this if we consider some of the many things that the New Testament urges us to do towards one another. We are, for example, to ‘love one another’ (John 15:17); to ‘bear one another’s burdens’ (Galatians 6:2); to ‘encourage one another’ (1 Thessalonians 5:11); to ‘serve one another’ (1 Peter 4:10); to ‘pray for one another’ (James 5:16); to ‘greet one another’ (Romans 16:16). There is no doubt that the Christian story is a story of unconditional love. God’s generous grace offers abundant transforming possibilities. The question becomes how we even begin to reflect that in the way in which we live. Desmond Tutu reminds us of how God models this unconditional love and how Jesus, in what he did and said, points that out. Citing the familiar parable that we usually describe as that of the prodigal son, Tutu (in Hope and Suffering) writes: The Good News is that God loves me long before I could have done anything to deserve it. God is like the father of the prodigal son, waiting anxiously for the return of his wayward son, and when he sees this feckless creature appearing on the horizon, he rushes out to meet him, embrace and kiss him, not recriminating, but asking that the fatted calf be slaughtered, a ring be placed on his finger, and the best robe be put on him; and they must rejoice in a party to celebrate because this lost one has been found, this dead one has come to life again. That’s a model for unconditional love!