A celebration of love

[AI translation] I didn't choose this Word: it was given to me ready-made, according to the Bible reading guide that we handed out to everyone in this congregation at the very first service of the year. This is the next portion of the Word for today. But I couldn't have found a more appropriate text for Christmas, the celebration of love. Because if someone were to ask me now what this world needs most on Christmas 1958, I could only say - love. Exactly what Jesus talks about in this Word. Because it is really only love that can bring something new, something good and beautiful into this world in crisis. And, behold, it is precisely this new, this good, this beauty that Jesus gives us in this new commandment. For look, he says in our Word: 'I give you a new commandment, that you love one another'. He does not impose a new commandment, He does not oblige us with a new decree, He does not oblige us with a new law - but He gives, He gives to the world a new commandment, as one who wants to please with it. As if to say: People, my Christmas gift to you today is this new commandment: 'As I have loved you, so you also must love one another' (John 13:34).It's as if Jesus were connecting us to the love-energy centre of God's paternal heart and saying: carry this on! That is why this command is a gift, why it is more than good advice or an order. It is like a spring rising in the desert. You can draw from it and take it everywhere. It can refresh and invigorate everyone. So let us draw from the spring first. What Jesus says: "As I have loved you" - perhaps never more clearly than at Christmas. For it was then that the miracle of which the Scriptures speak, "the saving grace of God appeared to all men" (Titus 2:11), in that tiny, helpless newborn baby, there on the straw of the stable in Bethlehem, as if God had laid his heart out. All the good that God ever intended for this world was embodied in Jesus. All that happened on Christmas Eve: that a child was born of a virgin; that angels appeared and sang to men on earth; that shepherds fell down in adoration before a baby; that Mary beheld the mystery with a holy trembling: all this was but a great overture! An overture to this message: God loves us! In all that this precious name Jesus means; in all that this name Jesus evokes in us; in His life, death and resurrection; in all that this one gospel resounds unceasingly, with a shaking certainty: this is how God loves us!
Everyone knows Jesus' words: 'For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life' (John 3:16). How much love? Think now of your own child or grandchild. Isn't it precious to you? Think of the way he smiles, puts his tiny arms around you and says: my father or mother! Such a little life can be so precious. And for how much would you give that life to someone you know doesn't love it, you know will torture it, humiliate it, torture it to death, kill it?! Would you? You don't have the treasure of the world to give away the one you love like that! You couldn't! Why? Because you love him! Well, that's what God did: He so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son!
Jesus is not the Son of God in the same sense as the smiling little soul who is hugging you, but that is what the Scriptures call the mystery of Jesus' person: Son of God, that we may have some idea of the unheard-of sacrifice God was able to make for us. That our hearts might tremble, our souls be amazed: Is this how much God loves us?" I wish you nothing more for Christmas than that you may experience something of the love with which God loves you in Jesus Christ. There is nothing that modern man needs more than to be truly grasped, lifted up and restored to an almost lost human dignity by this love. For look what man is slowly becoming in this overcrowded world: a number, a statistic. From being registered as a number by the telephone exchange, the gas and electricity companies, to being one in the street or one in thousands, to being registered as the same number of employees at your workplace, until you have the same number of plots in the same number of graves in the same number of rows in the same number of graves in the same number of graveyards. You lose your name and identity in the crowd. He becomes a small twist in the great machine of society. If it falls out, it is immediately replaced, and the machine goes on without a hitch. In the crowd - the man is lost. When a man in Pest complains that there is a crowd on the tram, he doesn't think that the woman who pushes past him is in a hurry because she knows she has to wash and cook the same day for the next. He doesn't think that the pedestrian whistling with a bruised face at the buffer between the two cars may be wrestling with spiritual issues. He doesn't think that the bus conductor, wearing the number 586 on his cap, is upset because he mishandled the ticket, because he is human, full of individual problems and concerns. More and more we are becoming these anonymous numbers to each other. In this way, we become spiritually fragmented, insignificant, greyed-out, devalued people, for whom our humanity is no longer worth anything, but our labour, our performance, the profits that can be booked after us.
Well, out of this, the love of God lifts us up. This name, Jesus, means precisely that God goes after the man lost in the crowd, that it is precisely the fate of such a man that catches his eye. Everyone may look over him as if he were a breath of air, no one may care about his personal affairs, but Jesus came precisely to lift man out of the tumult of the crowd and say: You are a child of God!
Do you understand? You are a man for whom God is ready to make the ultimate sacrifice of love. You are a precious one for whom God longs with great, compassionate love. So you are not just a nameless nobody among millions of others, but a person of the highest order: someone whom God loves! And then you may be, I don't know where, registered as a number, or you may live as lonely as you like in a little room in a tenement somewhere, blending in with the crowd, and many thousands may take you in or let you out of some factory gate: no one can take away from you the joyful solemn fact that you are a child of God. Oh, how beautified is the man whom one loves very much! Even an otherwise ugly girl, when she becomes a bride, almost blossoms like a flower, because she is beautified by someone's love. A loved person is always beautiful, because the love she receives leaves a mark on her. Even when God loves someone! The one who has a concept of this is truly beautified in this love, becomes different from what he was! If only this Christmas we could accept God's love radiating in Jesus in such a way that it would shine visibly on our faces!
But how can we accept it in this way? Well, the only way: by transmitting it to ourselves, by passing it on immediately, by transmitting the "current" received to someone else. In other words, as Jesus says in our Word: "As I have loved you, so love one another"! You will receive it if you immediately pass it on. I would like us all to understand that when Jesus says, "Love one another," he is laying down the law, the foundation of all human coexistence. Only on the basis of love can any human community live, from the family to social, national and even international coexistence. For every parlour game has its own rules to be played by. Whoever, for example, wants to play chess without observing the rules of chess, without moving the pieces in a regular way, causes a lot of annoyance to his partner. In a football match, the team members do not do what they think of at the moment, but what the rules of the game require, otherwise there is confusion in the team.
Human life is also like a big, deadly serious board game, which can only be played well if one respects the rules of the game. Otherwise there is terrible confusion and a lot of annoyance. This very complicated game, the way people live with each other, has basically only one rule. What Jesus says: "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, so you also love one another" - that is love. Trouble always happens when we don't play by the rules. Or, to take another example, when someone buys a complicated appliance, a radio or a television, they usually get an instruction manual, and if they don't treat the expensive machine right, they will soon break it. Well: God is the designer of that complicated device we call human coexistence. And if He has given us the commandments of love to use, then surely it is only by this rule that all human coexistence, in a house, or a street, or a country, can function properly. Otherwise it will go wrong.
So, around Christmas, most of humanity seems to feel something of this divine law of warmth. It has been so touching to see in recent days that here and there people have carried pine trees or taken trams with small or large packages of presents. You could see on their faces that they were preparing something, that they were preparing to please someone. How much joy for the one who makes it! How beautiful it makes life! What a good atmosphere it creates! What a wonderful celebration Christmas is, what an unheard of thing must have happened there in the night of Bethlehem, if the mere outward remembrance of it inspires a lot of people to give joy to another; to be transformed, at least for a day. The greedy become the profligate, the poor the rich, the unhappy the happy, the selfish the self-sacrificing. The next day all feeling falls back to where it tried to rise from. Let us not love one another in this way, but as Jesus said: 'As I have loved you'. In practice, this means loving as if it were Christmas Eve tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and the day after that.
Yes, love means, in a very concrete way, an act of giving pleasure to the other, of helping the other, of making the other's life better. Start with the person closest to you. The person who comes to mind or gets in your way next. Start by deciding: now I'm really going to visit that patient who I know would love it; now I'm really going to write that letter to my mother I've been waiting for; now I'm really going to forgive the person who ruined my life; now I'm really going to pray for the person who scolded me the other day; now I'm really going to give my tithe to the wretch I let go empty-handed the other day. I am full, for I have received so much, so much love, that it is all for nothing. "As I have loved you, so love ye one another".
There has never been such a need for people who can love as there is today. Because there is so much malice in the world. Everyone looks at each other with suspicion. We are afraid of each other! Well, no one should ever be afraid of you, no one should ever have to keep secrets from you. Let it be felt that you are people of whom no one need fear.
Diognetus, a prominent pagan in the second century, writes of Christians: 'They hold the world together. This was written at a time when the social order was disintegrating around them. The Christians were not part of this decaying order, they were part of God's indestructible kingdoms. That is why they held the world together with their love. They did it then, they must do it now! It is by the love of Jesus Christ that we must save society and individuals from the threat of destruction. Only love can do that. Wherever the precious gift of the new commandment of love is accepted, not just one day, but the whole of life is transformed into a celebration of love.
Amen.
Date: 25 December 1958 (Christmas).