2 John 1:1-13
“Grace, mercy, and peace will be with us from God the Father and from Jesus Christ, the Father’s Son, in truth and love….”
“And this is love, that we walk according to his commandments; this is the commandment just as you have heard it from the beginning – you must walk in it. 7Many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh; any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist!” (2 John 1:3, 6-7)
Somewhere in recent human history “love” and “truth” got divorced from one another. I don’t think this was love’s and truth’s desire. This isn’t a case of dissolution for reasons of irreconcilable differences. Indeed, I think something else came along and ripped love from truth’s arms and bound truth from embracing love.
Now, to be clear, truth and love still exist – they weren’t killed – but they don’t live under the same roof any longer. No, we took truth and we put it in the scientist’s lab, in the philosopher’s study, maybe in government (big maybe!). We then put love in the heart, in the Hallmark card, in the contemporary rom-com. We forbid truth and love from hanging out with each other. We thought it unseemly. We thought the distance to travel between the mind (truth) and the heart (love) was too great. At best, the two might be able to tweet at one another.
It’s not supposed to be this way. As John makes clear in his second letter (addressed to “the elect lady and her children,” which might be a real woman and her kids or it could be that the “lady” is the Church and “her children” are you and I; whatever the actual, historical reality is, I find this metaphorical interpretation to be more personally engaging for each of us, so let’s use it), love and truth are bound together. The gifts of God – “grace, mercy, and peace” – come to us “in truth and love.” And that makes sense.
If grace is merely love, but not true, then it is – by definition – simply a lie we tell ourselves to make us feel better. If grace is merely truth, but not love, then it doesn’t reveal the very character of God (“God is love”).
If mercy is merely love, but not true, then it is simply favoritism. If mercy is true, but not steeped in love, then it is mere diplomacy (not fellowship).
If peace is merely love, but not true, then we should be wary of future violence because “untrue peace” sounds like the definition of a cold war. If peace is merely true, but not love, then it is mechanical, rooted (most likely) in contractual agreements and treaties, not rooted in the very character of God.
Now, we need love and truth to live in harmony with one another if the gifts God gives us are to be truly from Christ and not “the antichrist.”
If you subscribe to Netflix, I’d encourage you to watch it’s new Christmas-centered rom-com, Love Hard. This film is unique insofar as it would appear to fall into the quintessential, cheesy, Hallmark trope of Christmas-centered rom-coms, but no sooner does it lure you in with its seeming familiarity than it flips the script. (I think I’m using that phrase literally). I realize we’re just a few days past Christmas, but I think you can still enjoy it.
In this film, the main character makes her living by writing about all of the terrible dates she finds using online dating platforms. Her continual angst is that people lie on these dating apps. Indeed, it is almost as if John wrote the script for this film because it focuses on a young woman who is looking for love, but never finds it because of the lack of truth. People lie about themselves online. They “catfish” one another.
Well, I won’t ruin the ending, but suffice it to say, our protagonist doesn’t find love until she can find both love and truth – both someone to be truthful with her and her own recommitment to being a truthful person herself.
It is rare to find a cultural artifact like Lord Hard. Most of the time, again, both our media and our own internal (and unobserved) assumptions divorce love and truth, keeping them on opposite sides from one another. But, if we are to truly live into our calling as the “children” of the “elect lady” (the Church), we cannot fall for this mistake. We must keep love and truth united that we might best be able to both receive and share the gifts of God’s grace, mercy, and peace. Amen.
