Rom 3:20-31

Lk 15:11-24

Valentine’s Day and the first Sunday of Lent coincided this year: here are some thoughts on the love of God.

It would be the easiest thing in the world today to talk about God’s love. God is love, according to John, and love is certainly one of the first characteristics of God to spring to the lips of Christians. We love quoting John 3:16: ‘God sooooooo loved the world’. We may even have one of those Bible versions which mistranslates this as ‘God loved the world so much …’ But I want to suggest that there is a deeper, more fundamental characteristic of God which trumps love every time: his righteousness.

Righteousness in the Bible is the characteristic of God by which he is faithful, true, just, qualities which are seen to be lived out in right actions. Righteousness is also demanded of God’s people, but is only available through Christ. In Romans 3, a passage written into a world where you became righteous by keeping to the letter of the Law, Paul explains that a new kind of righteousness from God has been revealed, available through Christ. In fact Paul has a lot more to say about righteousness than he does about love. To understand this, it will be helpful to think about it through one very common misunderstanding of the nature of God’s love: that it is ‘unconditional’.

This commonly used phrase is often heard in Christian circles, but in fact it is a phrase for which you will search in vain in the Bible. In Old Testament times people related to God through a ‘covenant’ – you do this, and I’ll do that.

You live righteously; I’ll enter into relationship with you, so that I’ll be your God, and you’ll be my people. Nothing unconditional there. And of course Jesus comes along and makes it worse: you don’t just have to live without unrighteousness; you mustn’t even think it!

So the love of God in the Bible appears to be conditional, and to accept the heresy that it isn’t has dire consequences.  It’s a very short step from that to the idea that we can do whatever we like, and live however we want, and God won’t mind at all, because he loves us unconditionally. This of course chimes in with that greatest value in our culture: tolerance. Whatever I do is just fine, because God soooooooooo loves me.

So am I saying that God doesn’t love us? Did the father of the prodigal son stop loving him while he was partying far away? Well, it depends what we mean by love.

When I was very young and silly, I fell in love. It was with Sophie Marceau, the French actress off of a Bond film, Braveheart etc. I was besotted with her: I particularly loved her ears. You could say that I loved her: I certainly had those feelings for her. But the tragic fact was that she didn’t love me back! In fact, sad to say, she totally ignored me. Actually I suspect she didn’t even know that I existed!

So was that love? If love is a feeling I have for someone, I certainly had it for my Sophie. But if love is a mutual relationship – this wasn’t! I believe this idea of ‘unrequited love’ is a much more helpful one in thinking about God than that of unconditional love. I don’t believe that the father ever stopped loving his son. He ached for him to come home, he longed every day for that return. But the relationship could not be re-established until the son repented, came home, and lived righteously. Until then his father could love him till he was blue in the face, but all it did was hurt him.

So I’m concerned about a gospel which says to people ‘God loves you unconditionally’. In fact God’s love in the Bible is always for those who are his, those in relationship with him, and never for the general public. He wants to love them, but most of time his love is unrequited, as people ignore him, or have no idea of his existence. Certainly he doesn’t tolerate their self-centredness, arrogance, violence, cruelty, and disregard for creation. He wants to love them, he longs for a relationship with them which is mutual and based on righteousness. But if they’re not interested, his love is unrequited love.

So am I saying that we have got to earn God’s love by way we live? Only if I’m righteous will God love me? Yes and no. A holy, pure, perfect God can’t be in  relationship with anything impure, so we do need righteousness. But Paul explains that a new kind of righteousness has been revealed. We don’t earn it: it is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.

How can righteousness be given? How can someone give me justice, uprightness, truth? Surely that’s about how I choose to live? No – the gospel says we are given the righteousness of Jesus, the sinless one, and that it is put onto us, like a white robe which covers all our unrighteousness, bentness, dishonesty, and unfairness. When God looks at a Christian, he looks at us through Jesus, and he simply can’t see beyond his righteousness to our sin. It isn’t about trying, it’s about believing and receiving. When we decide to love back the God who first loves us, but perhaps with unrequited love, we enter relationship with him, and he gives us righteousness.

But then the paradox, of course, and why this is important for the start of Lent as well as Valentine’s Day, is that we then spend the rest of our lives working to become more righteous, more closely to  live up to righteousness of Christ which God puts on us. That’s why we see Jesus fighting for his life against the  temptation to be unrighteous. That’s why Lent calls us to strive for greater righteousness, not so that God will love us, but because he does.

A few nights ago I had a vivid dream in which I was cooking a curry called ‘Chicken Chettinad’. I’d never heard of it, and assumed it was just one of those silly things you make up in dreams. But the next day I was flipping through a friend’s cookery book and what should I find but a recipe for chicken chettinad! I copied it out, and made one a few days ago. I can honestly say it was the best curry I have ever made, and I’ve made quite a few. So here by popular demand is my recipe.

This comes out slightly less hot than Madras, although it does have some poke to it. for a hotter version you could increase the chilli powder, or add some chopped fresh chillies with the garlic and ginger.

Hope it works as well for you as it did for me!

Chicken Chettinad

2 tsps poppy seeds
225g fresh coconut or 200g block of creamed coconut
1 tsp fennel seeds
1 tsp cinnamon
3 green cardamoms
4 cloves
¾ tsp turmeric
¾ tsp garam masala
Cooking oil
1 large onion, finely chopped
2 tsp fresh ginger, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
½ star anise
3 tsp red chilli powder
1.1 kg chicken, cut into smallish bits
3 medium tomatoes, chopped
Salt
Juice of ½ a lime
A few curry leaves
½ cup chopped fresh coriander

1)        Dry roast the poppy seeds, grind them, using pestle and mortar or electric coffee grinder, and soak in a little water in a large bowl for 15 mins

2)        Grind the whole spices (fennel, cardamom and cloves) and add to the poppy powder and water. Then add the powdered spices (cinnamon, turmeric and garam) and finally grate in the coconut. Make a fine paste, adding some water if necessary, but don’t make it too wet.

3)        Heat some oil in a pan and sauté the onion until light brown. Add the ginger and garlic and fry for 2 mins. Add the star anise and chilli powder, followed by the space paste. Fry for 5 mins, adding a little water if necessary

4)        Add the chicken and sauté for 5 mins. Then add the tomatoes. When the tomato juice has been absorbed, add 400 ml water and salt to taste. Simmer until the chicken is done and the liquid reduced.

5)        Just before serving add the lime juice and curry leaves, and sprinkle with fresh coriander.

My new Friday blog is for excerpts, tantalisingly chosen, from my new book God’s Upgrades … My Adventures. Here’s your starter:

I have a philosophy of life. It says that everyone you know, however briefly, leaves you with something which makes your life richer. It might be quite an insignificant thing: we still use the recipe for leek and potato soup which a parishioner in my first job put in the parish magazine. My ex-brother-in-law was the first person to play me Paul Simon’s Graceland album. Another guy I met at a conference taught me how to do video editing, which I now use all the time. Another unknown star was the first person to introduce me to the music of jazz bass virtuoso Brian Bromberg. Little things, but I’d be so much poorer without them.

Sometimes it’s not what you’d expect which lasts. For a while we went to a church Homegroup, where our leaders faithfully led us in prayer and Bible study week by week. But the really important thing they gave me was cheese. I grew up in a family where my Dad just couldn’t stand cheese, so there was never any in the house. On the odd occasions I did manage to try any, I had to agree with him: it was gross. But as I grew up and began to realise that there was more to cheese than yellow-orange cuboids of hard cheddar I became fascinated at all the different shapes, sizes, textures and smells available. I began wistfully to wish that I did like the stuff. I’m like that with tomatoes too: I wish I liked them but I just don’t. I spent one Greek holiday with the deliberate aim of getting to like them. I’d heard that if you eat something for long enough you get to enjoy it, and all those Greek salads would give me ample opportunity. But I discovered that the only way I could manage to eat the things was to smother them in tomato ketchup, which made them just about bearable, and also speaks volumes about the relationship between ketchup and real tomato. The net result was that I still hate them, and I spoilt my holiday into the bargain.

Anyway, our Homegroup leaders invited us round for a meal, and out came the cheeseboard at the end. I confessed my sad inability to eat the stuff, but my wish that I could, and with the infinite care and patience which only good Homegroup leaders can muster, they suggested I might try a little bit of this one, as it didn’t really taste much like cheese. So I tried my first ever crumb of that Austrian smoked stuff, which looks like a little brown plastic sausage, and much to my delight it wasn’t half bad. That moment was a turning point for me, and I began to explore, and eventually get to love, the rich variety of cheesy comestibles which in his bounty God has put into our world. Peter and Elizabeth: you changed my life!

But this book is about something bigger than music or cheese. If individuals, and some of them like ships passing in the night, can leave me with so much, weaving into my life things which have left me different and for which I remain profoundly grateful, how much more have I seen God weave into my life? And how much greater is the possibility of change and newness when God meets us and puts into our lives things for which we remain profoundly grateful?

God’s Upgrades … My Adventures was published in May 2014 by Authentic Media and is available online or from Christian Bookshops.