Community offers communion and communion builds community. It’s a circular statement, I know, but my aim is to point to the circularity–the reciprocity–of relationships. Every authentic relationship grows within the milieu of mutual exchange: we speak and we listen. We listen and we speak. We care and we receive care.

Souls become bonded into a community in this free exchange, an exchange we properly refer to as love whenever the reciprocity is motivated by selfless concern and care. To love is to give and to receive. The greater the love, the greater the exchange. Jesus said as much when he called his disciples to the full measure of love: “Greater love has no one than this, that a man lays down his life for his friends” [John 15:13]. The sacrifice of one’s own life as a means to care for another displays ultimate commitment.

And this commitment is what God himself shares in his own eternal communion of love. The Father loves the Son. The Son loves the Father. And the Spirit communicates that love in an eternal reciprocity of mutual delight and glory–a mutuality Jesus celebrated in his prayer for all his followers: “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given because you loved me before the foundation of the world” [John 17:24].

Jesus, of course, understood that the pathway to this shared glory came only by way of the cross! That is, the prayer of John 17 is the culmination of the promise of John 3:16, that God so loved the world that he sent the Son so we might believe in him and have eternal life. Jesus came in order to resolve the problem and power of sin by his own death. The Father’s love expended the Son’s life in order to give us the Son’s eternal life. Jesus, in John 12, spoke of this as the “purpose” for which he entered into manhood. He went on, “Now is the judgment of this world; now will the the ruler of this world be cast out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself” [John 12:31-32].

Death, of course, could not contain or restrict the Son who is the source of Life, so this plan paved the way for our own communion with God through our union with Christ–first in his death and then in his resurrection.

By this means the community of God’s love is extended to as many as have responded to his love. The Spirit pours out God’s love in our hearts and invites us to the eternal union of joint hearts in the life of the one Spirit.

Let me return now to what I wrote at the beginning of this post about “every authentic relationship.” The measure of real relationships is God himself as he exists as the eternal triune font of relationship. Yet there is a counterfeit to that fountain. Satan, in searching for his own alternative realm, conceived of an “un”-world. He reversed all that God is and does. In that realm of death (as opposed to God’s realm of Life) a revised version of what “god” means and what “relationship” expresses was established. Unlove replaced love. Self-defined moralities replaced God’s moral realities. Adam, in becoming “like God”, adopted a version of God that Satan proposed: a God of self-interest, of monadic and non-relational will. Autonomy now replaces community as the basis for meaning.

The implications of this were and are monumental. The original Edenic reciprocity of mutual love was replaced by the assertion of contractual expectations. Relationships became functions of utilitarian exchanges–the transactions of goods and services. Selflessness was replaced by self-interest and “love” became a conditional covenant exercised by mind and will rather than in the mutual devotion of shared hearts.

These relationships are inauthentic because they operate apart from God’s own heart. They adopt self-belief, self-devotion, and self-advancement as their axioms for operation. When mutual interests among parties are being met they can even mimic the communion of God, but only as a charade. In time they fail because the bond of the Spirit’s presence–his love and life–are absent.

God’s love in Christ came to undo all of this. By pouring out his Spirit into our hearts God invites us now to be partners and pioneers in an ever-widening community–sharing in God’s spreading goodness.

So now we have access to the very love that bonds God as the One who “is love.” We begin to love with his love. And with that love we begin to impact the world by our dismissal of the world’s conditional love and it’s debilitating contractual demands. Instead we find and then share the freedom of being fully and truly loved.

If any readers recognize your own place in the conditional realm of relations, and not in God’s realm of loving relationship, let me invite you to taste God’s goodness. How? By turning away from a self-directed life–call this repentance–and ask for God’s love to be poured out into your heart. He loves to share his love!

And here’s the punchline: “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, that you love each other” [John 13:35].

One certainty in life is a baby’s taste for milk.  No prolonged training is needed!  And it’s as true of babies in India as in Oregon . . . or anywhere else.

Yesterday as I toured the Taj Mahal I noticed dozens of Indian mothers and their infants present among the throngs of tourists.  The white marble of the Taj reflected the sun’s midday light in quiet brilliance.  Hundreds of people moved along parallel walks, flowing up to the dome and spires before us.  We stopped along the way for our photos, taking in the remarkable symmetry and elegance of this 17th century gem.

The infants, on the other hand, were indifferent to the beauty so near them.  Instead they were all oriented to their mothers.  Their security came from the one who held them, changed them, carried them, and fed them.  The Taj Mahal was simply a passing moment that all the babies ignored.  The bond of need and desire represented by a mother filled their world.

In his first letter the apostle Peter wrote of our own place in a world of passing splendors, of “perishable things such as silver and gold” [1 Peter 1:18].  We, too, are infants.  Infants in spirit, “born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God” [1:23]. 

This “seed” of God’s word birthed a faith in God in us that resets our deepest values and orientation to life.  In a real sense it returns us to the place of nursing infants, with transformed tastes.  What once fed us has become sawdust: “so put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander.”  All these things were the food of self absorption.  Instead we now “long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up to salvation.”

The key to this transformation, as Peter explains, is our new desire for God’s goodness, a truth he drew from Psalm 34:8, “Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good!”  Here we find our hearts captivated by something that makes even the Taj Mahal fade into mere background to the new ambition of knowing Christ.  We become travelers in this life and members together with others who have been born again into the life that a Taj Mahal can only foreshadow.  The babies have things in proper perspective: tasting the life of the one who loves us is the better reality.

Isaiah should be read relationally, as God’s heartfelt gift to us. His self-disclosure. His invitation. A resource from his heart meant to awaken our hearts.

Three chapters are especially powerful. Read them and see for yourself: 52, 53, and 54.

In chapter 52 the LORD speaks to his people in their captivity. First the slavery of Egypt, then the exile to Assyria and, ultimately, the slavery of personal sin. It is this last slavery that is most devastating because it is the heart that has been captured . . . by unclean living . . . by impurity . . . by brokenness. It was this last slavery that led to the other enslavements.

In their captivity God comes to his people, assuring them that it is through their physical exile that he has, once again, caught their attention: “Therefore my people shall know my name. Therefore in that day they shall know that it is I who speaks: ‘Here I am!’”

More often than not it takes hard times for us to listen! But God knows us and “brings good news of happiness” no matter how slow we might be in our responses.

His message is this: “Depart, depart, go out from there; touch no unclean thing!” Leave the captivity behind. And follow your escort, the LORD, “for the LORD will go before you, and the God of Israel will be your rear guard.” This is God’s “servant.” The one who “shall be high and lifted up, and shall be exalted.” Jesus would later explain this promise by linking it to the cross where he was “lifted up” for us, once and for all!

We discover how he is exalted as we go on to chapter 53. The servant offers the ultimate service of self-giving: “he has borne our griefs . . . smitten by God . . . wounded for our transgressions . . . crushed for our iniquities.”

We, his “sheep,” had all gone astray. Every one of us. Separated from him by our disaffection. Separated from him because our our stubborn belief that our own wisdom is better than his, and alien to him because we see our selves as individuals who can negotiate with him, rather than as creatures made by him and for him, made as those meant to respond to his love.

God sent him to receive our blows. To become a sin-offering adequate for disaffected slaves to sin. Here is the infinite Person coming down to our form in order to swallow our death in order that the many can be “accounted righteous.”

The servant’s suffering is profound both in its expense–the death of God, the man–and in its appealing invitation to us, calling for us to become his eternal companions in shared affection.

Many readers know Isaiah 53 from the Easter season, but we must not quit there! Isaiah 53 is much more than a judicial resolve, as some would take it, but a resolution on God’s part to remove a painful barrier that blocks that love. How? By both confronting and calling us. The invitation comes in chapter 54.

The imagery of Isaiah 54 is that of a forsaken bride, a bride dismissed for her promiscuity. Isaiah, however, is too delicate to make the charge so blunt. But Ezekiel’s prophecy makes the issue of whoredom explicit. Yet God’s confrontation was never meant to drive away his beloved bride, but to chasten her. He refuses to abandon the one he loves. Instead he sent the servant Son to capture her heart . . . to restore her affections. God’s compassion comes to the fore: “For your Maker is your husband, the LORD of hosts is his name.

He then speaks directly to his bride: “‘In overflowing anger for a moment I hid my face from you, but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you,’ says the LORD your redeemer.”

Our captivity has been broken by the suffering of the servant, offered at an unimaginable price! Yet that price also exposed our value to God. He treasures us and calls out our love.

Isaiah 52, 53, and 54 are a love story within a love story. A beautiful bride is stolen. Though enslaved she is recaptured. Her beauty had been degraded, reduced to an ugly coarseness. A rescuer was sent by the one who never lost his vision of her beauty. It is in that persistence that the gospel blossoms: beauty is remade and the bond of love restored. Three great chapters!