Love unknown

My song is love unknown,
My Saviour's love to me;
Love to the loveless shown,
That they might lovely be.
O who am I, that for my sake
My Lord should take, frail flesh and die?

The first verse of 'My Song is Love Unknown' is an even more poetic version of Luther's final theological thesis at the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518:

• The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it. The love of man comes into being through that which is pleasing to it.

Two things are expressed by both Martin Luther and Samuel Crossman's words:

1. God's gracious love is qualitatively different from our natural love - we love the lovely, but God's love is 'unknown' to our experience because he loves the unlovely. God is not just more loving (a Feuerbachian projection of our desires) but loves differently to the way we naturally love.
2. God's love is creative - God said let there be light and there was light. God declares us lovely and we become lovely. Our love is responsive because it comes after the apprehension of something lovely. God's love takes the initiative and comes first. But it is powerfully active because it pushes forward to its purpose - "That they might lovely be".

God does love the lovely too of course, and as I've clumsily blogged before, it worth meditating on how those loves inter-relate.