Love is an expression of unearned, undeserved care.

That’s at the heart of the words that Jesus spoke on a winter’s day in Jerusalem.  He was walking in Solomon’s colonnade, or Solomon’s porch. It was a massive covered walkway on the outside edge of the temple.

He was just there, a person visiting the temple. Some of the religious leaders spotted him. They gathered around him, maybe even cornered him.

“How long are you going to keep us in suspense?” they said. “Are you the messiah?”

It’s what we say to God sometimes, in the middle of our lives.

“Are you really God? When are you going to show up?”

“I’ve been telling you,” Jesus says, “but because you do not believe, you cannot hear what I’m saying.”

Jesus has been teaching and preaching and healing and debating for a couple years. He’s been pretty clear with the people around him. But he often says, “For those who have ears to hear, listen.” Which means that he knows that no matter how clear he is, some people won’t listen.

“Because you already have a picture of what it means to love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength, you can’t hear me.
You do things so that you will receive things. You are nice to strangers so that God will be nice to you. You keep the rules so that God will have to be good to you.”

And that’s not how love works.

Jesus gets clearer.

I speak and my sheep listen. I know them and they follow me. I give them eternal life and they will be preserved.

It’s a love that starts with God, not with us, an expression of unearned, undeserved care.

Paul, writing about this kind of a relationship says that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

God always speaks first. And everything we do is a response. A willingness to listen and agree and follow.

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This is the second part of my chapel message for the fourth Sunday of Easter and Mother’s Day.