NOTES for Rom 8:38-39
In essence, every Christian witness is always a witness to the Kingdom. This is hardly surprising: the chief task and central meaning of the Savior's earthly ministry was to bring the Kingdom into the world, while His chief work thereafter, today, and henceforth until His return in glory, became the nurturing of this Kingdom in our world, which is being transfigured but is not yet transfigured. Yet there are different ways of bearing witness to it, and one of the central forms is witness to the love that permeates it. This is only natural: the Savior Himself spoke of mutual love as a “new commandment.” What, one might ask, can be new about something as old as the world? And had little really been said about love before the Messiah came?
And yet there is something new and important in Jesus' words. Love, of course—at least in the sense in which the word is used in the books of the Bible—had always meant, first and foremost, a certain attitude toward one's neighbor: one in which a person wished them well. But Jesus speaks of something greater: He speaks of the Kingdom, where love becomes not merely an attitude but the very environment in which its inhabitants live, the spiritual environment without which there is no Kingdom. In a certain sense, love constitutes its foundation, its spiritual substance, just as natural substances form the environment of our untransfigured world.
And if a person has become a participant in the Kingdom, has become one of its inhabitants, and has immersed themselves completely in this spiritual environment, it is truly no longer possible to tear them away from it. For the Kingdom does not belong to our world or live by its laws; it enters our world, transfiguring it and changing its very nature, yet without becoming a part or an element of the former order of things that it is called to transform. It is hardly surprising that in the untransfigured world there is no power capable of affecting the bonds that connect a person with the Kingdom and with its inhabitants. What binds them is the love of which the Savior Himself gave His disciples an example, and which people of righteous life belonging to many different Christian confessions have manifested time and again: a love that no one can truly take away from a person unless that person betrays it.