Be compassionate as your heavenly Father is compassionate. Jesus challenged us with those words and there is more in them than first meets the eye. How is God compassionate?
Jesus defines this for us: God, he says, lets his sun shine on the bad as well as the good. God's love doesn't discriminate, it simply embraces everything. Like the sun it doesn't shine selectively, shedding its warmth on the vegetables because they are good and refusing its warmth to the weeds because they are bad. It just shines and everything, irrespective of its condition, receives its warmth.
That's a stunning truth: God loves us when we are good and God loves us when we are bad. God loves the saints God loves the sinners equally. They just respond differently. The father of the prodigal son and the older brother loved both, one in his weakness and the other in his bitterness, and his embrace was not contingent upon their conversion.
And we are asked to love in the same way.
How do we do that? First of all, it poses this question: If God loves us equally when we are bad and when we are good, then why be good? This is an interesting question. Love, understood properly, is never a reward for being good. Instead goodness is always a consequence of having been loved. We aren't loved because we are good, but hopefully we become good because we experience love.
But how do we, like God, embrace indiscriminately? How do we let our love shine on the bad as well as the good, without passing down the message that we are compromising with our moral values? How do we love as God loves and still hold true to who we are and what our values are?
We do so by holding our personal and moral ground in a gracious and loving way. And, for this, we have Jesus' example. He embraced everyone, sinners and saints alike, without ever suggesting that sin need to be compromised.
Let's take an example: Imagine that your teenage daughter comes home along with her boyfriend. You already know that they have crossed moral boundaries, and she ask you if the boy can spend the night in your place since it is already so late. What do you do? Do you allow him to spend the night at your home? What is the loving thing to do so that you can sponsor a relationship that stays til the end for you and your daughter and show the boy the genuine love of God?
Your answer should be clear, you tell your daughter, gently but unequivocally, that while they are under your roof and unmarried you cannot let him stay overnight. She objects: "That's hypocritical, my values aren't the same as yours, and I don't believe this is wrong in any way!"
Your response is the non-discriminating embrace of of the prodigal's Father in Luke 15: You hug your daughter and tell her that you love her, that you know that she has already crossed moral boundaries with her boyfriend, but that she may not do so in your house, under your roof. Everything inside of your body language, your embrace, and your person, will clearly tell her two things: "I love you, you're my daughter, I will always love you no matter what. But I don't agree with you on this matter. "
Your embrace doesn't say, "I agree with you!", it simply says, "I love you!" and the affirmation of your love, even as you hold your personal and moral ground will, perhaps more than anything else you can offer her, invite her to reflect upon your moral ground and why you hold certain things so deeply.
A wayward husband comes home to his hurting wife and ask if she would take him back. What should she do? Despite her anguish and pain, like the prodigal's Father, she should offer him her embrace and yet hold on to her moral ground and pave the way for his repentance.
There is a time to stand up for what we believe in, a time to be prophetic, a time to draw a line in the sand, a time to point out differences and the consequences of that, and a time to stand in strong opposition to values and forces that threaten what we hold dear. But there is also a time to embrace across painful conflicts, to recognize that we can love and respect each other even when we don't hold the same values.
There is a time to be compassionate as God is compassionate, to let our sun shine indiscriminately, on both the vegetables and the weeds without denying which is which. When we do that, we make a strong statement that we love one another even as Christ has loved us. It then enables broken people in a broken world to stay till the end.
