We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
The Greatest Love Story Ever Told
This is the first week of Advent, the season where we anticipate the coming of Christ. It’s a time to hear and enter into the story of how Jesus came out of love to give his life for us. This grand love story of Christmas taps into a deep intuition we have about the centrality of love. We possess an inexplicable knowledge that if life has any meaning, it must have something to do with love. One could argue that all of our intuitions about morality and the meaning of life are at root an intuition about the supremacy of love.
Of course, many of us today embrace a worldview that makes it difficult to make sense of this profound intuition. Many, for example, believe that only physical matter is real and that there is, therefore, no objective reality to moral convictions and no overarching purpose to life. Still, if we are at all emotionally and psychologically healthy, we will live like morality does objectively exist and as if there is a purpose to life, and this purpose has something to do with love. The dream of love reigning supreme is not easily extinguished.
This enduring dream of love has been expressed in stories told by various cultures throughout time. While most love stories are between humans (for example, Helen of Troy and Paris or Romeo and Juliet), some are between gods (for example, Ariadne and Dionysus) and some even between a god and a human (for example, Aphrodite and Adonis). Today, we don’t see many stories of love involving gods, but we do see extravagant love stories between people. Just consider the incredible popularity of the books and movies by Nicholas Sparks. Or the fact that during the Christmas season, there are some television channels that only run Christmas movies, and so many of them are love stories. The popularity of love stories might have something to do with the ways they connect us with a primordial dream.
It’s the dream of love that lies at the heart of every human being.
If the depth of one’s love can be measured by the sacrifice one is willing to make for the beloved, then the Jesus story must be judged as not only the greatest love story ever told, but also the greatest love story that ever could be told. It is the story of the all-powerful Creator God making the greatest conceivable sacrifice for people who didn’t deserve—or even desire—it. No story could be imagined in which a lover sacrificed more for a beloved who deserved it less.
In this sense, the Jesus story climaxes and fulfills the dream of all the greatest legendary love stories. J. R. R. Tolkien said that the story of Jesus has a “peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving” quality to it that is “mythical” in its perfection. All other love stories are approximations of this one.
Photo credit: Martin Beek via Visualhunt / CC BY-NC
Related Reading
Why do some of Jesus’ parables depict God in violent ways?
Greg deals with the question of what it means that some of Jesus’ parables seem to depict God in violent terms. In addition to getting an answer to this question you’ll be treated to a window into Greg’s graceful way of moving through the world. Really classy. Enjoy!
Love OR Judgment – You Can’t Have Both
Image by Morgan Sessions We cannot judge others because it is not our place as humans to function as the center—because God is that center—and judge other people. In addition, we cannot judge others because we ourselves are sinners who deserve judgment. If we don’t want to be judged, Jesus says, we must not judge. The…
Atonement: What is the Christus Victor View?
Most western Christians today understand the atonement as a sort of legal-transaction that took place between the Father and the Son that got humanity “off the hook.” The legal-transaction scenario goes something like this: God’s holiness demands that all sin be punished, which in turn requires that sinners go to eternal hell. The trouble is,…
God’s Love and Your Freedom
The most distinctive aspect of the revelation of God in Christ is Jesus’ demonstration that God relies on love to defeat his enemies and to accomplish his purposes. More than anything else, it was the perfect love of God revealed in the incarnation, ministry, and self-sacrificial death of Jesus that in principle defeated evil and…
The Deepest Reality of Christmas
Christmas is about so much more than what our culture has made it to be. It’s about the unraveling and reversing of the curse. It’s about the coming of God to us in love and humility. That’s the real gift and the deepest reality of Christmas. Bless you all today as you reflect on these…
Podcast: Could Jesus Have Sinned? (part one)
Greg considers the nature of temptation and the temptability of God. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0114.mp3