11 May – Love before trust
Easter 4
11/5/2025
John 2:13-25
Our life begins again with the cold, hard love of God. (I’ll come back to this! )
“Many believed in his name because they saw the signs that he was doing.”
Is this the reason that the government of Anthony Albanese has been re-elected with such an overwhelming majority, that “many believed in his name because they saw the signs that he was doing”?
This is a half-serious question – even more than half serious! As we noted last week, ours is a world in which we are constantly seeing signs, fitting them into frameworks of meaning and determining whether or not to trust them. Despite most conviction to the contrary, “believe” and “trust” are not religious acts. They are social and political – deeply human necessities. We are always engaging with signs and committing ourselves because of them.
Of course, the dynamics of politics and voting are complex, and it’s not quite clear what signs the Prime Minister was making or how they were understood by those who voted for his government. But politics is very much about signalling: “See what we have done”, “Hear what we promise to do”.
Last Sunday, our interest was in meaning, which we took to be a matter of location. Something has meaning when it is located within the way we experience the world. The crowd in the reading placed the signs – located them – and so they placed Jesus also. And we might note here in passing the challenge the religious authorities throw at Jesus after his attack on the Temple economy: What sign can you show us for doing this? , which is, again to recall last week, a question of how Jesus “fits”.
So also with our politicians. They become meaningful for us when their signs (or at least the promise of signs) are meaningful to us and how we think the world is, or should be, or shouldn’t be.
But unlike how it works in the political system, the belief of the many in Jesus because of the signs he has been doing is balanced by Jesus’ own scepticism: “Jesus on his part would not entrust himself to them because he knew them. ” The word the Greek text uses for Jesus “trusting” himself is the same word which it uses for the crowd’s “belief” in Jesus, so that we could then translate the Greek something like this: Many believed in Jesus’ name because they saw the signs that Jesus was doing, but Jesus himself did not believe in them. That is, Jesus and the crowd disagree about the signs he is making.
Perhaps this is obvious, but less obvious is that it’s quite different from what takes place in our political processes. The politician must necessarily cast herself as one with those who have voted for her; we “believe” in her, and she implicitly believes in us. Our voters and our elected representatives agree on what the signs mean. In more extreme political systems, such as those tending towards fascism, it becomes necessary that there is an even closer identity between the political leadership and the populace than mere mutual belief and trust. Vladimir Putin is Russia, Donald Trump is America, and Viktor Orbán is Hungary. In such places, it is not so much that the opposition is excluded; it is that the opposition is unnecessary: everything is order, such is the agreement of the people and the leader, such is the mutual trust, such is the sense for the signs.
The crowd’s belief in Jesus is this type of identification, and Jesus’ unbelief in the crowd is the rejection of this identity. A little later in the story, we will hear,
When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world. ” 15 When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself. (6. 14f)
“Jesus, Jesus, he’s our man! He’ll Make Judah Great Again. ”
But crowds, of course, are fickle. The turn of the story in the Gospels testifies to this, as does the strange quiet that has doubtless descended in the kitchens of the Dutton, Bandt and Daniels households, among others. We might wonder whether the signs change, or the framework of meaning within which we try to locate them changes, or whether it’s we ourselves as interpreters who change. Whatever the case, we with our signs and meanings are highly unpredictable, and it’s here that our signings and believings part company with those of Jesus.
Because if the scriptural text expresses scepticism about our capacity to attribute meaning correctly and about our shifting allegiances, the same text nonetheless insists on God’s persistence with us. If Jesus does not believe in those who believe in him on their own terms, he nonetheless loves them.
For the many, trust and love are equated, so that we can only love those we trust. But for God, lack of trust is not grounds for lack of love.
Last week we heard that the world “did not receive him” and today that “he knew what was in everyone”. By themselves, these are dismal declarations about the human being, but only if we read them by themselves. Because the point of these observations is not to emphasise the darkness in the world but the persistence of the light: the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it (1. 5). Despite our wrong reading of the truth, still that truth persists with us. God’s unbelief – untrust – in us is no barrier to God’s active, persistent love.
And so, to emphasise out the contrast, we might risk putting it this way: God’s love is a “cold” love. If warmth describes the affection of the electors and the elected, of lovers who recognised and trust each other, then the love of God in Jesus is “cool”, cold.
But it is no less love for that coolness. Cold love is the love which comes before trust, the love which loves another despite herself, the love which is not reciprocated on love’s own terms.
Warm love generates itself out of the positive feedback of fire for fire. This is nature’s love, and it matters deeply because it’s the love that keeps the world turning, if only as a wheel on a cobblestone road.
Cold love is not natural. It is the love which is commanded.
It is the love which is not yet reciprocated and might have to suffer misunderstanding and rejection.
It is the love that persists not for its own sake, as warm love often does, but first for the sake of the beloved.
Cold love matters because warm love’s turning of the world is often cruel and towards darkness, and the fires of warm love are easily extinguished.
But it is the gospel, and it is the reason we are here today, that cold love sees and acts, persists and overcomes.
If we mistake the signs God makes, God just keeps making them. And making them. And making them.
This is love, John says elsewhere:
1 John 4. 10…not that we loved God but that God loved us.
And loved us
And loved us
with a love as hard and unwelcome as the cold of a tomb,
until the love which affronts us like death proves itself, in fact,
to be the source of life in all its fullness.
If God in Christ knows us, knows what is in us, this is not the bad news of exposure under harsh light but the good news of a love hard enough to undergo anything, durable enough to overcome anything.
Jesus comes not to condemn us but to love us, to death.
This is the cold, hard, persistent love by which our life begins again, in which we have our meaning, and with which we are sent into the world: to love as God has loved us.