It’s a tendency to see a prohibition as a limit on love.
“I love you, but…”
Michael Kelly points out that the prohibitions of God are not the limits of his love, but the expression of a care that flows from perfect love.
He is not denying us, he is loving us.
From Kelley’s article:
With Jesus, prohibitions are not exceptions to love; they flow from it:
Looking at him, Jesus loved him and said to him, “You lack one thing: Go, sell all you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me” (Mark 10:21).
In other words, Jesus loved this man enough to tell Him to sell everything He had. And we would do well to remember it. Because today, and every day, we will come up against the prohibitions of Jesus. And the temptation will be for us to regard Him as ungenerous. As uncaring. As persnickety. Anything but loving. But here is where we come back not to what we think in the moment, but what we know to be true.
We know it to be true that Jesus loves us. And whatever prohibitions we come up against flow from that love.
