Summary
Conditional vs. Unconditional Love
Set the love of God beside the love of the world and the contrast is stark. The world's love runs on conditions: it flows when expectations are met and dries up when they are not. God's love, revealed supremely in Christ crucified, is unconditional—given freely, sustained without merit, and unbreakable.
Palm Sunday in Mark 11:1-11 puts both kinds of love on display. For most of His ministry, Jesus had silenced public declarations that He was the Messiah; an early disclosure would have invited a premature death before the appointed hour of the cross. But now, days from Calvary, He deliberately fulfills Zechariah 9:9, riding the colt into Jerusalem as the humble King. The crowd—swelled by the raising of Lazarus, the conversion of Zacchaeus, and the healing of the blind—throws cloaks on the road in submission to the monarch and waves leafy branches as signs of victory and joy. Their cry "Hosanna!" means save us, and "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord" is messianic praise of the highest order.
Yet the very intensity of that adulation exposes its conditional nature. The same crowds had earlier tried to seize Jesus by force to make Him king after He fed the five thousand John 6:15—because their bellies were full. When Jesus taught the cost of discipleship, or refused to be the political deliverer they wanted, the love cooled. They wanted a Messiah who would save them from the Romans, not from their sin. Within days, "Hosanna" would become "Crucify Him." That is what conditional love does: it adores while expectations are met, and turns cold when they are not. As the Conditional vs. Unconditional Love study makes plain, this same temptation lives in us. When blessings overflow, our love for Jesus is easy; when troubles come in bundles and He does not act as we think He should, our affection can grow cold.
Now look at the same situation from God's side. We do not live up to His expectations. We do not act as He would have us act. We even love Him conditionally. And what does He do? He sends His Son to the cross, where Jesus bears all our sin—including the sin of our fickle, conditional love—takes the punishment that should have fallen on us, and rises on the third day. The verdict over us becomes: forgiven. That is love with no strings attached.
Paul presses the point in Romans 8:35-39: neither hardship nor distress, persecution nor famine, nakedness nor peril nor sword—nor death nor life, angels nor rulers, things present nor things to come, powers nor height nor depth nor anything else in all creation—can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Pandemic cannot. Failure cannot. Even our own wavering hearts cannot. He has claimed us as His own in the waters of Holy Baptism, and He will not let go. That is the wondrous love of God—a love that holds us fast for today and for all eternity.
Video citations
- "Conditional vs. Unconditional Love" — Would you open your Bible's place with me this morning to the 11th chapter of the gospel of Mark for our study this morning? Throughout the season of Lent, we have been focusing on the theme of the…