The Superabundant Logic of God's Love

The regulations in Exodus 23 that pertain to the Sabbath and annual festivals are interesting for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is that the effect of these regulations is focused beyond the individual who follows them. For example, the regulation that God’s people rest on the seventh day of every week has an explicit result and/or purpose clause that has nothing to do with the one who rests: “Six days you shall do your work, and on the seventh day you shall take a holiday so that your ox and your donkey will rest and the son of your servant woman and the sojourner catch their breath” (Exod 23:12). This result/purpose clause has a logic of superabundance that reflects God’s own character. This reflection will consider how the superabundant logic of God’s love flow through us in our own love of neighbor.

The superabundant logic of God’s love is crystalized in the mission of Jesus Christ. As one scholar has said, “In dying for us Christ does not love us because of particular qualities in us that make us attractive to him (Titus 3:5), nor does he love us in the abstract, as an undifferentiated porridge of humanity. Both of these options assume that love must be wrung out of God like water from a damp towel. The love that sent Christ to the cross is not drawn out of God from the outside, but it overflows him, so to speak, from the inside. God loves us because God is love (1 John 4:8, 16), not because of our qualities and not in the abstract.”[1] This is the superabundant logic of God’s love. It is not a love that depends on past performance or potential return on investment, but a love that flows out by grace to his chosen and treasured possession and through his people to others. God’s superabundant love is the paradigm for our own love of neighbor.

In light of that, our own love of neighbor should have a destabilizing effect on the way the world considers social relationships. Again, Christopher Watkin says it well: “My neighbor is neither my beloved, the one chosen because of his or her loveliness, nor humanity as a whole, nor again people from my nation, ethnicity, or demographic. My neighbor is an anarchic category, a happenstantial intrusion into the carefully curated networks of family, friends, and coworkers, an anomaly not on my list of ‘friends,’ a subversive shuffling of the relational cards.”[2] The result/purpose clause attached to the regulation for a weekly Sabbath in Exod 23:12 reflects this derivatively superabundant love because “the son of your servant woman and the sojourner” are far from the “carefully curated networks” that the world might expect to be the beneficiary of a person’s favor or love. In a different context, Jesus drives this point home when he says, “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid. ¹³ But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, ¹⁴ and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just” (Luke 14:12-14 ESV). That is the superabundant logic of God’s love that flows through us to our own love of neighbor.

Now, this all has a bearing on how we prioritize our time and labor. Once more, Christopher Watkin shows how the logic of superabundance governs the use of our time and labor:

In a biblical understanding of the world, the logic of equivalence only finds its place and its legitimation inside a logic of superabundance. For example, a major biblical justification for work and private property (the logic of equivalence) is so that Christians will have funds to that they can give away (Eph 4:28). Earning is justified by giving. This verse issues a challenge to every Christian reading this book: Do you see your own work through this lens of superabundance, or are you blinkered by the ambient logic of equivalence that dictates we earn not in order to give but in order to have?[3]

May we all learn from Christ the superabundant logic of God’s love so that it might flow through us to our own love of neighbor.

[1] Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2022), 415.

[2] Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory, 416.

[3] Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory, 421.