When we try to understand “God’s love for sinners” outside the context of Jesus’ own teaching and practice, we’ll drastically miss the point. First, “sinners” in the gospel (almost) never referred to “all people” the way it does now. It referred to a specific category of people.
Second, on the whole (but with exceptions) Jesus treated different categories of people differently. He (generally) treated poor, the oppressed, the socially outcast quite differently than he treated the rich, powerful, and religious leader.
His interaction with the former looked a lot like what we recognize as “love.” His interaction with the latter often didn’t (see Luke 11).
So we’re left with a couple of options. We can either say that Jesus didn’t actually love the latter group, or we can say that his love for them was expressed differently. Obviously, I think it was the latter.
But I’m convinced many a white moderate (myself included for a long time) would have scolded Jesus for being too divisive and too harsh. But I’m trying to do better at believing that maybe Jesus actually knew what he was doing.
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