Is dying for your friends the greatest love?

(Image from a Weslyan church group study)

In John 15:13, Jesus claims that there is no greater love than to lay down one's life for friends.

I disagree.

What's more, I think that Jesus' own actions show that his claim was wrong. His actions show an even greater love ... because Jesus laid down his life for not only his friends, but for the whole world. Seems to me that Jesus voluntarily sacrificed himself not only for those close to him, but even for those who consider themselves enemies of God. Dying for your enemies is surely a greater (or deeper?) form of love than doing so just for your friends!

As Paul commented in Romans 5:8, "God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us". Love is not primarily shown through what God does for friends but what God does for enemies.

So John 15:13 is wrong!

But wait! For those committed to Biblical inerrancy there is another option. What if Jesus demonstrates a God who has no enemies? That aligns with the implications of Matthew 5:43-48, from which we learn that God loves even those who might consider themselves God's enemies. Even if a person thinks that way, God treats them as friends ... and Jesus willingly dies for all of God's friends. In which case we could read John 15:13 this way: "Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. And by the way, from God's point of view you are all friends."

Embracing Chaos

Chaos and Order: a visual puzzle in stained glass

I read yet another Christian thought-for-the-day piece this morning that celebrated God's ability to bring order out of chaos. Made me wonder why chaos gets such a bad rap.

There is a popular strand of thought that sees order as good and chaos as evil. In religious circles that thought is extended to position God as the lord of order and the arch-enemy Satan as the presumptuous lord over chaos. But surely that's not the Biblical view?

God is Lord of all – Lord of both order and chaos.

Certainly, God created the structure of the universe out of the formless void (Genesis 1). God provides physical  boundaries so that the sea stays in its place (Jeremiah 5:22). Gravity so that the stars stay in their place (Psalm 8:3). Psychological boundaries to guide our personal growth – like the Law, which acts as a kind of tutor (Galatians 3:24).

But God also created the Flood (Genesis 6-8), deliberately caused confusion (e.g. Genesis 11:7) and watches over a world dominated by entropy (Romans 8:20-21). God can calm the storm (Psalm 107:29) just as Jesus did (Matthew 8, Mark 4, Luke 8), but God created the storm in the first place (Psalm 107:25)! Jesus raised several people from death, but God had allowed them to die, and they all presumably died again later on.

I think it is time we stopped trying to escape from chaos. Let's stop thinking that when things go a bit crazy and out of (our) control that God is absent – or even worse, that God must be angry with us. God can be found in the good, the bad, the happy, the sad, the order and the chaos, because God is always and everywhere present.

God is as wild as fire and as uncontrollable as the wind. God cannot be contained or explained by any systematic, ordered, analysis but will always be mysterious and never fully known. My wife is mysterious and never fully known, and I take that to be a good thing! Why would we expect otherwise of God?

Do you wish we could escape the chaos of suffering and unknowing, and find a world of order and certainty? Why would we expect that to be either possible or helpful?

Of course we could not survive without a level of ordered predictability. But meaning and creativity and growth are found in the disruptions of life. Better to embrace those chaotic disruptions than try to escape them.

It's ok not to know. It's ok to experience confusion, uncertainty, pain. It's ok to not be in control. In fact my bet is that we will find God in the chaos.

May you have order and safety when you need it.

And may you have chaos and risk … when you need it.