Daily Manna · Day 276 · October 3
Loved as Jesus Is Loved
“Thou hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.”
Why is the first hymn most people ever learn written in the present tense?
Jesus loves me, this I know. The words first appeared in an 1860 novel, spoken over a dying child, and they have been sung by more people than any hymn with a better tune. Nobody sings that Jesus loved them on the days they behaved. It is present, it is flat, and it does not grade.
Jesus is praying aloud the night before he dies and he intends the room to hear him. Thou hast loved them, as thou hast loved me. The word doing all the work is as. Not a smaller love of the same general kind, kept in a lesser cup. The same love at the same measure. And he puts it in the past tense, hast loved, which means it was settled before any of the men listening had done a thing to deserve it, and before three of them fell asleep on him an hour later in the garden.
So the nursery line was accurate the whole time. Present tense, no grade, no adjustment for the version of you that failed on Tuesday. It may be the hardest sentence in the New Testament, and it fits in a child's mouth.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 276 is A Little Fire (James 3:5).