‘The Love of God’ or the Cross?

I visited a local church today for a baptism communion service. In some respects it was my ideal service (over in just under an hour and a quarter, very friendly, lots of families and kids), but I was deeply disappointed with the sermon.

The preacher had two passages, from Acts and John. In Acts, Saul was struck blind and spoken to by Jesus. In John, Jesus told the disciples how to catch a load of fish and then asked Peter if he loved him.

The preacher began by talking about the debate between nature and nurture, relating it to the child about to be baptised, and to his own recently baptised granddaughter, as the family and friends of each wonder about the child’s future.

He wanted to offer a ‘third way’. This ‘third way’ was above, beneath and beyond nature and nurture. The ‘third way’ was the love of God. This love is the foundation of life, given equally to all, unchanging no matter what kind of person we are, no matter what our nature is, or how we are nurtured.

It was a short sermon (5-10 minutes), and mentioned Jesus once. The two Bible passages were simply ‘illustrations’ of the love of God in action (we weren’t told how, or in what way), and mentioned in a maximum of five sentences towards the end of the sermon.

I was left wondering what in fact was Christian about it. It seems to me that many people could have spoken about love as a third way, between nature and nurture, and found a couple of illustrations in the Bible, or in some novels. The rather nebulous phrase ‘the love of God’ occured many times.

Many people appear to use this phrase as a way of not offending anyone, of saying something without really saying anything at all. After all, what is this ‘love of God’? Is it acceptance? Is it a gift of something? Is it simply ‘being there’? Is it all three? Or something else? I couldn’t help but wonder if the sermon wouldn’t have been a whole lot better if the preacher had talked about Jesus instead of ‘the love of God’.

Richard Hays writes this: ‘the content of the word “love” is given fully and exclusively in the death of Jesus on the cross.’ (Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997, p.202)

If we follow Hays, the main reason the preacher told us very little in his sermon, is because he never thought to give real content to ‘the love of God’. He could have given us, from the passages he had, a blinder of a sermon about discipleship and life following Jesus, how difficult it is, following the way of the cross, yet how possible it is, in the power of the cross. What a sermon for a baptism! To say nothing of the baptismal symbolism of dying and rising with Christ, or of Jesus’ call to follow him (in both passages).

As you can tell, I was left extremely unsatisfied by the sermon. Christian leaders and preachers need to be teaching and demonstrating to their congregations a Christian way of understanding and living in the world. Otherwise, what is the point of being a Christian? And, at the deepest leve, that Christian understanding, that Christian way of living, is in fact the way of ‘the love of God’, but that way has a real, concrete and historical (and human) definition: the way of the cross.

Mark 8.34.