Here is an excerpt from an essay posted at Whosoever.org by Lori Heine:
No one forces God to love us. We are entirely dependent upon God's goodness. God's good - and always will be - because that's Who God is. As "His" Name, as given to Moses at the burning bush, implies, "I am who I am." Or, translated more correctly, "I will be who I will be."
Those who are good to those they don't have to be good to testify to the light of God. There's no "what's in it for me?" attitude for them. The less self-interested their love for others happens to be, the more God-like it is.
God weeps with us when we cry. But God doesn't have to do that. No one would punish "Him" if "He" stonily hid away and left us to weep all alone.
We make much - and rightly so - of the fact that Jesus was born a human being, in this human world, to live, and laugh, and cry, and suffer and die alongside of us. But there were other choices He could have made along the way.
He was, like each of us, rooted in a particular time and place. He could have been one of those Jewish men who simply thanked God every morning He had not been born a woman, disdained contact with all gentiles, tax-collectors and other "sinners" and spent His life congratulating Himself on how He had "earned" every blessing because of His superior godliness.
Instead, He befriended women (shocking even His own disciples by so much as talking to one), even going so far as to welcome them into His family of disciples. He healed the servant of the centurion - believed, by many scholars, to have been the man's male lover. He reached out to and welcomed tax-collectors and sinners of every sort, and declared that there would be gentiles in Heaven.
Click here to read the rest of the essay.
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