On my walk to the post office this morning, I stop by the ice sculpture in the park. It is a large carving of four hearts, with much of the delicate detail lost from days in the sun. Still, it’s a great focal point for my thoughts on the Sermon on the Mount, though there are many other reminders of love in town.

Hearts are everywhere.  It’s that time of year.

What I mentioned in my last post framed up this sequence of Jesus’s teachings in a new way.  If the Beatitudes are an overview of the pouring out and filling that defines the life of a disciple, then perhaps Jesus’s reshaping of the Old Testament law should be seen in that light.

And that got me musing on the nature of love within the Trinity.

So, foolish artist that I am, I try to draw it.  Reaching for an Escher-like construct (and failing), I attempt to portray the interlaced nature of pouring and filling that goes on the Godhead, what C. S. Lewis calls “the living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God forever.”

This image, of course, falls fall short.  For that love is not unidirectional giving.  It’s more like a living web.

Our love, on the other hand, is about taking.  This isn’t to say that we don’t have ample examples of selfless love (nod to parents), but in general we are endlessly looking to our own needs first.

A little farther down the street, I come across Valentine hearts in the window.  I chuckle at the juxtaposition of these two, like the desperation demands of a modern broken heart.  Note the me focus.

This is what’s wrong with us.

So, here is Jesus, the emissary from that eternal web of love. He wants his followers to know this dynamic of pouring out and being filled.  But the Law – let’s call that the guardrail that keeps us from the full fruition of our tendency to take – has morphed into a fixation on how close one can live to the guardrail and still be safe.

Therefore, he shakes things up.  His point is not to simply make the rules harder.  (“Not just murder, but anger!”) He’s trying, I think, to pull his disciples into the light and life of God’s love.  If our goal is to find out exactly how much we’re permitted to take, we’ll never comprehend how his love gives.

It is about emptying oneself and relying on God to fill that emptines

“But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked.”  Luke 6:35

As I return from the post office, there are workmen at the sculpture.  They’re dismantling it just moments after I stopped by.  They toss the hearts onto the ground nearby, smashing them into chunks of glittering ice, left for the sun to deal with.

And the phrase pops into my head: “This is my heart, broken for you.”

I am one of the “ungrateful and wicked” Jesus came to die for -- so that I might enter that living, dynamic activity of love

That’s a truth able to melt anyone’s heart.

Jesus, you teach us and show us what love is. But how our hearts need to be reshaped, refocused, redirected by your Spirit, that we may experience the joy that comes with being poured out and filled by your love.

Reader: How might you picture the dynamic of God’s love?

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