‘To love as we were loved by Christ’ is to love with passion= to love with our passion in Christ’s passion.
Without passion, there is no love.
Without passion, love fails.
Without passion, love is a deus ex machina abstraction that has no existential punch and carries no existential weight.
Without passion, love buckles in Gethsemane and never reaches Golgotha.
Without passion, there is no sacrifice, and no descent into death and hell, to retrieve the lost at the worst place of loss, the place of worst ruin and final danger.
Without passion, Christian love does not exist. It has no reality, it does nothing, it changes nothing. It flees the crunch. It neither plumbs the worst, nor plants the best in the worst, to redeem the worst by reforging it into the best.
In sum– without passion, the whole Christian mystery is lost.
If we have a falsely Greek aversion to the ‘the passible’, not understanding the Jewish truth that it is only out of the ‘the passible’ that the immutable is ‘won’, then we will always fall short of following Christ all the way into the room of no exit.
In that room is God.
In that room is the devil.
In that room is the deeper heart ground on which all humans stand.