The refusal of love is to hate being itself. If we hate being itself, we are consumed in the fire of our own wrath. Either we love or we punish our own existence. Think about the pictures of judgment given to us by Jesus in the Gospels. What is the criteria of judgment? Love, always love. In Jesus’ parable, the rich man ends up in hell, not because he failed to believe the right things, but because he failed to love Lazarus. For all we know the rich man had impeccable theology. What he lacked was love. In the parable of the sheep and goats, the goats are not condemned for wrong belief or for
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