Who would not love thee, loving us so dearly?
The beautiful line from the beloved great Christmas
Processional, Adeste fideles, is made elegant by a play on the word
“dearly.” “So dearly” can mean “with
such intense affection,” or “at such great expense to himself.” As we contemplate the miracle of the manger,
we see that both meanings apply. The
threefold God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost truly loved us with an everlasting
love, having loved us In Christ before all worlds, loving us with a love that
sin does not cancel, death does not terminate, and hell itself cannot
overwhelm. But this unspeakable love
was manifested at incredible pain and expense to the Divine Lover. From the wonderful night when there was “no
room in the inn,” though a humble and uncomfortable life in which the Son of
Man had no place to lay His head, to the agony and bloody sweat of Gethsemane,
to the pain of the cross itself, truly He loved us both intensely and
expensively.
But sadly,
this line is a rhetorical question which provokes more than one answer. The desired answer is that this amazing love
manifested in the manger and the cross arouses our love in return. Simple logic seems to decree that great love
of God calls forth an equally great love on the part of the beloved. But sadly, there were and still are many who
do not love the manger child. Who would
not love him? Herod would not, nor Pontius Pilate nor Judas Iscariot. They were perfectly capable of answering
Divine love with cruelty and hate. Nor the reveling multitudes who use His
birthday only as a time for extravagance and self-indulgence. They, like Herod
and Pilate, would not love Him because of their own depraved nature. As St John tells us, “He came unto His own,
but his own received Him not.” We wish we could say that God’s dear love for us
constrains us to love Him proportionately
in return. But honesty compels us to confess that the lovelessness of
Herod, Pilate and Judas was only our ingratitude writ large. If only Abelard were right, when he wrote,
“Our sins, not thine, thou
bearest, Lord, Make us thy sorrow feel,
Till through our pity and
our shame, Love answers love’s appeal.”
Yes, He truly bore our sins, since He had no sins of
His own. But love’s appeal was answered only with rejection,
slaps, mockery and spitting. Surely
there is nothing in the universe so defiant of simple logic, so irrational, so
criminally insane, as not loving Jesus.
St John,
the apostle who wrote most deeply about the Divine Love, spoke more wisely than
our beloved Christmas carol, or than Abelard, when he wrote, “We love Him
because He first loved us.” This
love, vastly earlier, deeper and more enduring, is perfectly encapsulated in the tiny babe
wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a feeding-trough. Because he loved us so much we are bound to
love Him and to love one another. LKW
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