“…that you being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”
Ephesians 3:17-19
Could we with ink the ocean fill,
And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade;
To write the love of God above
Would drain the ocean dry;
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched from sky to sky.
– Fredrick Lehman (quoting Rabbi Hertz?)
Love is not our first impulse. At least it doesn’t seem to be mine. Not when I’m driving and someone pulls out in front of me. Not when the latest celebrity scandal is being broadcast on every channel. Not when someone disagrees via social media with what I believe to be true…about religion…or politics…or college football. Not when the fast food or express checkout line is taking too long.
You might say, “Actually Jason, it sounds like you are talking more about mercy or grace or even patience than love.” Truth be told, I assume those ideas to be deeply and inescapably intertwined, like a fishing line in the hands of my eight year old son….every single time he casts.
This is both the power and the powerlessness of love. Love compels inexplicable and unexpected grace. And this is perhaps what has the most power to change the world. It also leaves the lover, the mercy shower, the grace patron extremely exposed and vulnerable.
Because love is not our first impulse…even when we are offered mercy. Upon reflection at the end of the day we may often find our greatest struggle to be an inability to fully receive and extend love. We are bad at this…really bad. It has been our ruin. It continues to be our ruin.
We are far too prone to exchange the power of love for our love of power.
Control. Bartering. Manipulation. Positioning. Comparing. Coveting. Lusting. Coercing. Rejecting. Hurting. Gossiping.
We are much better at these. They seem to come more easily, more naturally, more…impulsively. Love takes work. It doesn’t come easy for us.
In the latter part of Ephesians 3, Paul prays that we would “…know this love that surpasses knowledge.”
I have found myself, on more than one occasion, proclaiming that someone, “will never fully know how much I love them” without pausing to wonder why this is the case. I say it in a way that is almost haughty, convinced that this expresses in a fuller way how very much I love the person. But is the fact that they cannot fully know my love some sort of merit badge for a deeper sort of love? Or does it simply highlight how very bad at love we all really are? Is the problem in my inability to fully communicate my love or their inability to fully receive it? What is the barrier that makes love so hard to fully grasp, to rest in, to live out? After all…was it not for this very thing that we were made?
We were made by love, out of the overflow of love, for the purpose of love.
How in the world did we get so bad at this?
In our “better” moments we catch glimpses of how things could be. Compassion wells up in our heart for the hurting. Mercy replaces anger. Selflessness stands in for greed.
But it doesn’t take much to disturb the moment and blur our clarity, like a rock thrown into the waters where we once stared at our own reflection. And we revert. We go back to what we know best. We give ourselves over to familiar impulses. And it all leaves us feeling, rather…empty.
“…that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”
We are drawn to the words in the latter part of Ephesians 3. They flutter in our ears and off of our lips, reminiscent of a truth we once knew but struggle to remember. Their power is not lost on us even if their application far too often is. Somehow we know that if we could just “get” this, everything else would fall into place; personally, globally, eternally.
Like so much of what Christ taught and exemplified, the concept is simple, almost cliché, but the challenge of living into the simple truth proves much, much more difficult.
“Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generation, for ever and ever! Amen.”
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