A deep part of the puzzle of human living is that our desire to be understood and loved is often buried under a fear that if we were seen, the other wouldn’t and couldn’t, looking right at me, say “I love you.” Life is often a cruel combination of “sighing to be approved” (George Herbert) and yet living among others as what Taylor Caldwell calls “sealed vessels” (The Listener). Trapped in this habit of hiding — of shame and secret-keeping — any “I love you” feels like it comes with a footnote: The “you” that is loved is not actually you, but only what Thornton Wilder describes as our poses and “postures before a mirror”: the image we show the world while under the surface hides a lonely, longing, yet still unseen someone.
God’s love is a for-us-as-we-actually-are kind of love. This is one significant implication of God speaking, of the word becoming flesh, of that enfleshed word being promised in bread and wine and water: embodied love that makes contact with actual humans. This love also makes contact with real rather than ideal people through the diagnostic word that unmasks us, that finds us in our hiding, that speaks louder than our lies. To quote Wilder again, he says that what we are gesturing towards when we say art is “true” is that when a painting or poem or song or sculpture encounters us we find ourselves saying, “Oh, that’s the way it really is.” God’s need-unveiling, honesty-evoking love is like that. It reveals what really is. It digs deeper than our denial and reveals that God has “searched me and known me” (Ps. 139), that before this God “all hearts are open, all desires are known, and no secrets are hid” (Collect for Purity). And here — where and when “you” can only mean “you” — the gospel gives the one who “loved me and gave himself for me.”
Thinking with The Alcestiad, you might say that the distinction between law and gospel describes the language God speaks so that those God loves can hear, receive, and experience that love. God unearths our honest need, and so says, “I know you.” And to “you” — with no footnotes — God speaks his first, fundamental, and final word: “I love you.”