Gratuitous Love (4th Sunday Lent B)

Gratuity is an uncommon word as the concept itself is quite strange in this profit-oriented society.  In this era when economic gain seems to be the be-all-and-end-all of life, we easily acquiesce to the principle that nothing comes for free.  There’s no such thing as a free lunch, we say.  Everything has a price.  Everything has to be paid.  Even in the theological exposition of the “economy of salvation,” the expiation framework easily makes sense to most of us:  The cross of Christ is some kind of a payment for our sins. To be saved from sin, someone has to pay the price. This logic we understand quite readily.

The readings today, fortunately, offer us another way of understanding the mystery of our salvation.  The readings invite us to see our relationship with God from the point of view of God’s gratuitous love.  For this we need to let go first of our fixation to concepts like profit, interest, price, payment.  We need to accept the principle of gratuity:  The best things in life are for free.  The nearest common concept to gratuity, I think, is gift-giving.  But again, even this concept has been tainted with self-interest as in the case of our exchange-gift-Christmas-party favourite.  We give and expect to receive.  All too often, we are robbed of the joy of pure giving when we fail to receive what we have expected to.

Something is gratuitous when it is offered unwarranted, undeserved, unmerited.  It is pure gift. Not demanded nor bought.  God’s love to us is gratuitous. This is illustrated in our first reading (2 Chr 36: 14-16, 19-23), when God inspired Cyrus, the King of Persia, to free the Israelites from Babylonian captivity.  This loving act of deliverance was unmerited by an unfaithful people.  Despite their sins, the people of Israel were restored to their own land.  St. Paul expresses this in the second reading (Eph 2:4-10) with more clarity of insight into God’s undeserved love and mercy: Brothers and sisters, God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love he had for us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, brought us to life with Christ... For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you; it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so no one may boast (vv. 4-9). 

Clear as daylight. We did not deserve to be cared for.  We were sinful, unfaithful, hard-headed, proud, and selfish. Despite these, we were saved from the very sins that had brought death upon us.  Such is the greatness of God’s love. Gratuitous indeed!

Moreover, today’s gospel (Jn 3: 14-21) highlights God’s love as his own initiative of giving up his only Son that we may have eternal life: For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. The Son of God is lifted up on the cross as God’s ultimate act of sacrificial love.  Through this sacrificial love, our enslavement to sin has been broken.  Selfishness has been overcome by total self-giving.  And by Christ’s resurrection, death is vanquished; eternal life dawns for all of us who believe.  And all of these come to us for free.  It’s pure gift.  If there’s one thing we can be sure of about what God is not, God is every inch not a businessman!

In this season of Lent, we may do well to heed these following invitations:

Conviction.  Are we convinced of the gratuity of God’s love for us? Isn’t it the case that often we are practically incredulous of God’s capacity to love us despite our unworthiness? In our relationship with God, we allow our sense of unworthiness to get in the way.  We still think that we can only come to God when we are worthy; so, when we are not (which is often the case), we keep God at bay.  Lent is an opportunity to strengthen our conviction about God’s gratuitous love for us.  It is God’s grace which makes us worthy of him. We need to surrender to this truth and there can be no stronger proof of his unconditional love than the fact that, by God’s initiative, his beloved Son was lifted up on the cross... that we may have life.

Celebration.  A true disciple of Christ has all the reasons to be joyful. This season invites us to celebrate the joy of being loved gratuitously.  This is an invitation to a joyful spirituality, living each day with the delight that the new life in Christ brings, living in a loving relationship with God with utmost confidence in God’s unfailing fidelity, if not in our own capacity to be faithful.  May this season help us to truly relish with joy our freedom from sin and death won for us by Christ through his cross and resurrection. 

Commitment.   We have been loved unconditionally.  God loves us not because we are good.  God loves us despite ourselves. He loves us warts and all. His love is not because of our merit.  His love is pure gift.  Every day we receive his grace and we experience his mercy as gift. This experience of gratuity invites us to a commitment to self-giving, to be a man-and-woman-for-others, to serve without asking for reward, to give to those who cannot give back. 

May the Lenten discipline transform us into the effective signs of the presence of God’s gratuitous love amid this society which puts a tag price to just everything.