Via Maggie's Farm, an excellent essay from Walter Russel Mead tackling how God can love the unlovable:
Strange as it may seem, the maker and ruler of the universe seeks out the pleasure of our company; we can please God and we can hurt him by the ways we treat him, treat ourselves and treat one another.
All this means that human beings present God with an extraordinary problem.On the one hand, we are irresistibly lovable, beautiful and, where God’s love is concerned, needy: how could we not be? Beings made by love out of love are inescapably drawn to the perfect love from which they come. No matter how grizzled and grumpy we become with the passing years, or how pimpled and snarky we turn in our adolescence, God looks at us with the kind of tender solicitude and hopeful anxiety with which we look at small children.
Yet at the same time, like many angelic looking children, we’re a fairly nasty bunch of characters, more Lord of the Flies than Little Lord Fauntleroy. Just pick up a newspaper or go to your favorite news site: genocides, starvation, vast contrasts of poverty and wealth; terror, arms races, environmental destruction; the rich and the poor cheating and stealing from one another, with the rich generally doing best because they’ve got more power to abuse; nations nursing ancient wounds as hatreds fester.
Or back off from these entrenched historical evils and look at what goes on in families, neighborhoods and among friends. Abused children grow up to repeat the cycle. Children of alcoholics and addicts grow up with psychological wounds that predispose them to repeat the same sad behavior. Widespread epidemics of cheating in school, cheating on taxes, cheating on expense accounts, cheating on spouses. It’s a bit like the national debt; each generation gets the bill for its parents’ shortcomings – and passes that bill with some additional charges down to their own heirs.
Christians talk about this situation under the heading of original sin, saying that our species has been a big dysfunctional family since the dawn of time, and that each of us repeats and adds to that cycle of abuse and betrayal in our own way even as we suffer from the damage done by those who came before. Other religions object to the kind of metaphysical structure that Christians give to the concept, but virtually everyone intuitively gets this picture of a human race somehow at war with itself and fundamentally out of whack.
This flawed race trapped in a cycle of cascading pain and wrong is what, and who, God is bound and determined to love; the question is how can he do it?
From the Christian point of view, this is not a trivial problem.
People aren’t just messy and incomplete. We are actively evil. As Reinhold Niebuhr puts it, we place ourselves at the center of the moral universe instead of God and our neighbors. We aren’t just victims of an unjust society and a tragic history; we make choices that perpetrate and even deepen injustice and add new dimensions to unfolding tragedies of our time.
God is so loving that he can’t leave us to perish in our misery and mess. He wants us with a love that will not be denied.
And there's no more proof of that sort of love than the proof found in the Incarnation, where God joined humanity's misery and mess in the person of Christ.
Read Mead's entire piece... it's thoughtfully well written and more than adequately gives us a glimpse of God's character, His grace, and a love that cannot be fully fathomed.
Carry on.
