Love Is Cheap to Talk About

Anyone can say God loves people. It costs you nothing to say it, which is half the problem. You can stand on a street with a microphone and announce the love of God to strangers for an hour, then go home and treat your own family like staff, owe your tailor for three months, and talk about your neighbour the way you would never talk to his face. 

The announcement survives all of it. 

Nobody can check it. And people, who are not stupid, worked out a long time ago that it can't be checked, so they stopped taking the words at face value.

When Jesus said the world would recognise his followers by their love, it was a serious statement. 

That's John 13:35, spoken the night before he died, and he was telling them what the evidence would be. Not how loud they preached or how cleanly they argued, but how they treated each other. 

It is a strange thing to stake your reputation on if love is mainly a feeling you describe. It makes more sense if love is something you do out in the open, where it can be seen and weighed and found wanting.

The early church seems to have understood this better than we do. Tertullian quotes what outsiders were saying about Christians in the second century: look how they love one another. 

That line didn't come out of a sermon. It came from watching. When plague hit the Roman cities and people with means got out, a lot of Christians stayed to nurse the sick, and not only their own.

They buried strangers.

They fed people who would happily have seen them dead a year earlier.

They were doing, more or less, the things Jesus said the last judgment would turn on, taking in the stranger and looking after the sick (Matthew 25:35-36). Argue about the theology all you like, but a fair historian has to grant that the faith spread partly because of things people saw, not only things they were told.

There's a reason for that, and it runs to the centre of the whole claim. 

Christianity says God is love (1 John 4:8) and then says something much harder to handle: that this love turned up as a person. The Word became flesh, John writes, and moved in among us (John 1:14). It ate with the people respectable society kept at a distance, laid hands on bodies no one else would go near, and ended up executed for the benefit of the men who arranged the execution.

A claim like that was never going to travel on words alone. If your gospel is that love became a body, you can't carry it with talk that never becomes anything.

James wouldn't let his readers slip out of this. In the second chapter of his letter he pictures a man with no coat and nothing to eat, and a believer who tells him to keep warm and eat well and then gives him nothing, and he calls that kind of faith dead (James 2:15-17). Not lukewarm. Dead. John is blunter still. Say you love God while hating the brother in front of you, and you're a liar (1 John 4:20). That's his word, not mine.

None of which means preaching doesn't matter. It does. Kindness on its own gets filed away as kindness and the name of Christ never comes up, so the deeds need words to explain them.

The Christians nursing the dying told people why they were doing it. The trouble is the order we usually default to, where the words go out and the life never backs them up. Those words don't fail because they're false. They fail because no one believes them.

So watch where it actually gets settled. Not in the sermon. The test is the junior who can't promote you or pay you back, and what you're like with him when nothing is riding on it. It's the deal nobody is auditing and whether you stay honest inside it.

It is the ordinary afternoon when you hold power over someone weaker and no religious person is in the room to see what you do with it. That's where people find out whether the God you talk about is real to you, and they'll read your words by what they find. Clumsiness with words is survivable. Being fluent about a love you don't live is the thing people don't forgive.