He Loved Us

I should say plainly that I cannot hand you the exact book and page for this sentence. It travels widely under Lewis’s name, and it fits everything he actually wrote, but I have not been able to trace it to a verified source. I would rather tell you that than invent a footnote. What I can stand behind is that the thought is thoroughly his. In The Four Loves he spends a whole book sorting our affections, much of which is need and appetite, from the love that comes down from God as gift rather than bargain. The line we have here reads like that distinction boiled down to a single breath. It also carries weight because Lewis was not a man who found belief easy or who looked away from suffering; he wrote honestly about pain and about his own slow, grudging walk towards faith. So when he says God loves us because love is what God is, it is not the cheerfulness of someone who never had to wrestle. That is partly why I trust it.

The reflection already catches the small word “is”, and it is right to. I want to lean on it a moment longer, because that one verb decides everything. Saying God is loving describes a habit, something he tends to do. Saying God is love describes what he is, the very stuff of him. Lewis is drawing on the language of 1 John, where John twice says that God is love (1 John 4:8 and 4:16). Read slowly, John never claims that we are loveable, or even that we make ourselves so. He says love begins in God and pours out from him towards us. Which quietly reshapes the question we keep asking. “Why does God love me” assumes the answer is hidden somewhere in me, in my record or my usefulness. But if love is what God is, the answer was never going to be found in the one being loved. It was always in the One doing the loving.

The frontmatter ties this quote to 1 John 4:10, and it helps to see what John is doing there. He is writing to ordinary believers in churches that were, by the traditional reading, being unsettled and divided by people who thought themselves a cut above the rest. John keeps pulling them back to something plainer and harder: love one another, because the love is real and it came first. In 4:10 he sets the order out so it cannot be missed. The point is not that we managed to love God and he responded; it is that he loved us first, and the proof of it is the sending of his Son. I find that order almost bracing. We did not start this. We did not even answer it well to begin with. Lewis’s sentence is really John’s argument compressed: the love is not God’s reaction to our worth, it is the spring from which any worth we have comes at all. And John, like Lewis, will not leave it floating in the abstract. He pins it to a sending.

Push the claim to its furthest edge and it arrives at the cross. Lewis knew that warm words about love cost nothing until love itself costs something, and the cross is where the cost is shown rather than spoken. Paul makes the same move in Romans 5:8, where he points to Christ dying for us while we were still in the wrong, not after we had improved, not once we had become worth it. Notice the timing yet again. The love moves first, towards people who have done nothing to earn the movement. You can watch the same shape running right through Scripture: Hosea told to love a wife who keeps leaving; the father in Luke 15 picking up his robes and running to the son who had thrown everything away; Jesus on the cross asking forgiveness for the men holding the hammer. It is the one kind of love strong enough to hold a frightened person, because it does not depend on that person staying impressive.

I will be honest about where this actually bites for me, and it is not on the good days. It is the ordinary Tuesday when I have been short with someone I love, skipped the prayer I meant to pray, and caught myself quietly assuming God has gone a degree cooler towards me because of it. That assumption can feel spiritual. Mostly it is my own weather projected onto him, the same warming and cooling the reflection describes, dressed up as theology. What steadies me is remembering that the love never rested on my performance, so my performance cannot shift it. I do not have to climb back into favour, because I never dropped out of it. That is not permission to stop caring how I live; if anything, knowing I am already held makes me freer to face the mess honestly instead of hiding it. I have sat with people who were dying, and with people sure they were past saving, and this is the only thing I have ever found solid enough to say to them and mean.

• Where do I catch myself trying to earn a love that, by John’s account, reached me first, before I had done anything at all?
• When I sense God has cooled towards me, is that really him, or is it my own mood wearing his face?
• If his love for me rests in who he is rather than in who I happen to be today, what fear could I finally put down?
• Who in my life needs to hear, in plain words, that they are loved before they have tidied themselves up?

If you would like to keep going, you could read more from C.S. Lewis or sit a while with some Bible verses about love.