The Law of Love

One of my favorite films of all time is a 1929 film by the famed director, King Vidor, called (I hesitate to mention it in this time of year) Hallelujah! The film tells the story of Zeke, a sharecropper from Mississippi who comes to Memphis to sell the family’s cotton crop and squanders the money on gambling and lose women. Afterwards, in typical fashion, he has a profound conversion and becomes a fiery revival preacher. As he goes around preaching, he encounters a prostitute named Chick, who at first taunts him and then is converted. Chick is a new woman, she is upright, righteous, justified and clean, all the things a new convert should be.

Then one day her old, um, business manager, Hot Shot shows up. Hot Shot is bound and determined to draw Sister Chick back into the world of sin and a violent fight ensues, It ends with Chick taking up a fireplace poker and beating Hot Shot to death. Exhausted from her labors she stands triumphantly over the dead beaten body of Hot Shot and proclaims to the heavens as she tosses the poker down. “That is what is going to happen to anyone who tries to block my path to glory.”

The Law of Love is relentless and we must be relentless in its pursuit. More violent than any two-edged sword, or fireplace poker for that matter, the Law of Love cannot be ignored. Christ came to preach and his preaching is compelling. Not one jot, not one smudge of this Law can be neglected until its effects have conquered hearts, conquered souls, conquered the world. The Law of Love consumes its followers, propelling us, missleing us into a totally fulfilling reality.

Like a case of naked peeps in a small cosmological microwave, the Law of Love is determined to fill this place and this place, leaving no room for half-measures, half-heartedness, half-interest. Powerful and utterly exhausting, the Law of Love experienced in the broken body of Christ Jesus beats down the pimps of our collective and individual lack of imagination (that is sin). It might drag us kicking and screaming but the Law of Love is going to conquer this place, Jesus is going to have us for his own. He is going to make us more gentle, more kind, more loving toward one another, drawing us into the promised land where the bright promise of his immortality crests the dark horizons of minimalism and mendacity like the light of a morning sun cresting the edge of a piece of bread or dancing, glimmering playfully off the surface of a cup of wine.

The Law of Love is filling this place and will fill us as well, clearing out path drawing us on from glory to glory now and always and unto ages of ages.