In the book The Color Purple Celie writes letters to God speaking of her devotion. When trouble after trouble happens she feels abandoned by God who, she says, is “glorying in being deef.” Her friend, Shug, tells her she is looking at thing backwards. She does not need to get God’s attention, God is trying to get hers by showering signs of the divine presence all around her even in something as simple as a purple weed in a field. That reversal of vision is what St. John expresses in his epistle. In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that God loved us. We don’t need to do anything to get God to love us. God loves us before we say or do anything and we can’t change God’s mind about us. A famous book from the middle ages by St. Anselm asks the question, Cur Desu Homo, why did God become a human being? His answer has become known in history as atonement. According to Anselm God was offended by sin and demanded an infinite reparation that only a divine savior could pay. That is not St. John’s perspective. God became a human being according to the evangelist because of love, because God’s love needed to overflow into creation and what better expression of that love than God sharing in creation in the birth of the Son of God, Jesus.
