21st December 2025
Advent 4: Love
I have spent a lot of the last week trying (with mixed success...) to persuade the primary school children of Penge that the best Christmas presents can't be wrapped. My Christmas assembly ends, as nearly every year, with that famous verse, John 3:16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son." And I'll appropriately ignore the child who reminded me that Jesus was actually wrapped - in cloths - before being laid in the manger!
As the weeks of Advent draw us closer and closer to Christmas, we light this Sunday the fourth candle on the wreath, the candle of God's love for the world he made, the world that turned against him. In John's writing, the word kosmos, meaning "world", stands for everything that is against God's desires and purposes for creation. So when we read that "God so loved the world", it holds all that meaning. God so loved everything and everyone in creation that turned against God and all God stands for, that he gave his only Son. This is the sort of love Jesus spoke of when he commanded his hearers in the Sermon on the Mount to "love your enemies". This is the sort of love Paul reflects on in Romans, when he recalls that "while we were still sinners, Christ died for us."
John 3:16 is a big, cosmic verse with big, cosmic significance. But the working out of God's love for the world which has turned against him happens in very ordinary, unseen ways. It happens through Mary, visited by an angel while probably still in her early teens and told she will bear a child, to be called the Son of God. Mary's obedience is costly: of her reputation, her standing in the community. In the end, it will require her to stand at the foot of the cross where the religious and political powers of the day join forces to execute her firstborn son. It happens through Joseph, invited by an angel in a dream to trust God against all the evidence of his eyes and ears, to hold onto the deeper truth that God is revealing. Joseph's obedience is also costly: he must face down the gossip, take Mary as his wife and look after her and a child who is not his, including by taking them as refugees to Egypt. This sort of love is a daily choice - to trust, to protect, to persevere, even when circumstances are against us. This sort of love is, as one writer put it, "love with teeth".
God's love for the world, for all that is against God's desires and purposes in creation, is not a feel-good emotion, a romantic wish that views creation through rose-tinted spectacles and hopes for the best. God's love for the world as revealed in the giving of his Son, Jesus, is a love that has faced the world as it really is, the evil and chaos and confusion that surrounds us, and chooses to love it anyway. A love that chooses to entrust to frail, flawed humans like Mary and Joseph the most precious thing in creation - God's own Son. A love that chooses to persevere with a world that has turned against him, to continue to offer the hope of something better - a world restored where God's justice and peace may reign eternally. A love that chooses to protect us from the worst our sin can do, by taking it upon Godself, rather than to leave us to live out the full consequences of our repeated turning away from that love.
And that love is expressed in the greatest gift of all: a baby, a baby wrapped not in sparkly paper but in cloths, and lying in a manger. My prayer for this week is that as we share in the familiar story of Christmas and those well-known and well-loved carols, we will each receive afresh the gift of God's love in the baby in a manger.
