The Hero Who Risked All for a Whore
As part of my church internship, I’m required to read The Church and the Surprising Offense of Gods Love: Reintroducing the Doctrines of Church Membership and Discipline by Jonathan Leeman. Although there are many things to share, I really appreciated this quote about love and submission, and how Jesus risked it all, not for a damsel, but for a whore.
In spite of the fact that most people want to separate love and submission, everyone knows that love and submission involve risk. We see shadows of it in the stories of childhood where the hero risks all for the happily-ever-after ending with the beautiful damsel. What’s unexpected about Christianity is that its great hero doesn’t risk all for a damsel but for a whore. Then he calls everyone that he saves to submit to this whore—the bride still being made ready, the church. When you get down to it, people are not afraid of submitting. They’re afraid of submitting to ugliness. We love submitting to beauty. … Submitting to the local church is, in one sense, submitting to loving ugliness. It’s submitting to loving our enemies—other sinners who have their own visions for glory that don’t match our own. But this is how Christ loved us: “Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another” (John 13:34). Christ loves us with a love that transforms the ugly into the beautiful (see Eph. 5:22–31). So should our love for our churches be.
Who can love like this? Only the one whose eyes have been opened and how hearts has been freed from the slavery of loving this world. “So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36).1
Leeman, Jonathan. The Church and the Surprising Offense of Gods Love: Reintroducing the Doctrines of Church Membership and Discipline. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2010, 350. ↩︎