As followers of Jesus the Christ, we long to walk as he walked, speak as he spoke, and love as he loved. Our prayer is to be unified with the God of the universe that came down from his timeless transcendence to be a lowly Jewish man in the midst of a particular culture. We see something in his life that is utterly mystifying. The way in which he lived and died is captivating, and the only word to describe it seems to be...love.
We find that Jesus' desire for our lives as well is to love, just as he is love. He even says the greatest command is to love the Lord with all of our heart soul and mind and love our neighbors as ourselves. The beautiful thing is, this command is not something that we really have to figure out on our own, because Jesus promised that he would send a “helper,” his spirit, to guide us into that reality. Not only would this helper show us the way to love, but it brings us into God's nature, so that we could be one as Jesus and his Father are one. Imagine that, not only did God choose part of his essential nature to come into tangible, human reality and live a life of service and sacrificial love, but he then invited us to unite with him in the same way that The One he sent is united with him.
Uniting with God, who in his own nature is a “richly complex relational matrix” as Oord and Lodahl put it, doesn't stop on a metaphysical level. Throughout the story of Israel, God's chosen people were to show the world what God was like through the lives that they lived; they were to be blessed so that they could be a blessing (Gen. 12:2). The reality that the God of Israel needs a physical representation in the world is shown with the story of Israel, Jesus, and now those who have chosen to follow Jesus, the Body of Christ. In our unification with God, through the outpouring of his love on our lives, we are now to be a blessing to all nations, to literally illustrate what Christ is like. Oord and Lodahl remind us that not only is this illustration of loving others important, but it makes complete the love that we have already received. John's epistle says it well, “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.”
In our western mind, as we begin to see the reality of the need of love to illustrate the love we have received in Christ through his spirit, we often leave it up to the individual to act out. However, as we are reminded in Relational Holiness, God in his own nature is communal, a relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit that is a dynamic giving and receiving of love. Not only is the God we serve relational, but he calls out whole groups of people to share in his love. Yes, he inspires individuals, but only so their reflection is in community. Jesus' prayer for his disciples was that not only they but “those who will believe through their word” would be one, just as Jesus and his Father are one. In reflecting the love that we followers of Jesus the Christ have experienced, we must truly become one. This brings up some very pertinent questions for us to ask ourselves, how are we loving our brothers and sisters? Are we unified with those we consider “the church?” How am I still making love individualistic?
The whole idea of relational holiness not only pushes us to walk out in love as the core of being holy, but also to do so in community. It would be easy to make love the core of holiness, yet still act it out in the framework of self. If we are truly to become holy as our relational God is holy, and to live out the vision portrayed from the beginning of God's story, we need to press into each others lives and reflect love together.
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