Tag: john-lennon

For the fourth Sunday of Advent 2025 – Love

Isaiah 7:10-16
Again, the LORD spoke to Ahaz, saying, ¹¹Ask a sign of the LORD your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven. ¹²But Ahaz said, I will not ask, and I will not put the LORD to the test. ¹³Then Isaiah said: “Hear then, O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary mortals, that you weary my God also? ¹⁴Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel. ¹⁵He shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. ¹⁶For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted.
Matthew 1:18-25
Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. ¹⁹ Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. ²⁰ But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. ²¹ She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” ²² All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:
²³ “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall name him Emmanuel,”
which means, “God is with us.” ²⁴ When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, ²⁵ but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

Introduction: an illustrated story
John was born on October 9, 1940. He was the only son of Alfred and Julia. Alfred was a merchant seaman who was at sea when John was born. He sent his paychecks home to provide for his family. That lasted about five years. In 1945, Alfred went missing, and the family only found out when the checks stopped coming. When he came home six months later, he found that his wife was with someone else. Alfred tried to take John, but he was not a fit father, and Julia had started a new family with her new man. John was essentially orphaned.
In 1946, John moved in with his mother’s sister, Mimi, and her husband, George. Mimi and George had no kids of their own, and they took John with love and affection. They taught him to appreciate literature, art, and music. George bought John a harmonica, and John also learned to play the banjo and guitar. He was raised in the church, and he loved to sing.
At age 15, John formed a band called the Quarrymen. After a few members changed places, they eventually changed their name to the Beatles.
John Lennon was an orphan, raised and loved by Mimi and George. Their love and sacrifice for him are deeply tied to the spirit of songs like “All You Need Is Love.” Lennon’s life as an “orphan” became so important to the world, to pop culture, and to the music of the 21st century. Many people of a certain age can recall the night the Beatles played on the Ed Sullivan Show. How different would the world have been if Mimi and George had not stood up and taken John into their home with love?
I. The Crisis: Joseph’s Dilemma (v. 18-19)
In the first chapter of Mathew, we begin with a dilemma: Joseph faces a difficult decision. He has learned that Mary was pregnant before her marriage to him, which creates a challenging situation. As a righteous man, Joseph had to weigh his options and the impact his decision would have on Mary’s life: he could either expose Mary publicly or end their engagement quietly. This seemed to him to be the only two decisions he could make. However, because Joseph was righteous, God gave him an alternative. One that society and the religion of the day would not have approved of.

The Divine Intervention: Angelic Revelation (v. 20-21)
In God’s mercy, He sent an angel to Joseph in a dream, comforting him and addressing his worries and confusion. The messenger assured him that the child in Mary’s womb was not the result of human interaction but was conceived by the Holy Spirit according to God’s eternal plan. The angel told Joseph to take Mary as his wife and to name the child Jesus. The angel also explained that this promised Son of God would save His people from their sins, fulfilling God’s promise of redemption made before the foundation of the world.
III. The Fulfillment: Prophecy Realized (v. 22-23)
The fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy— “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel” (which means, God with us)—has profound significance for Joseph, Mary, and even us today. It means that God chose to enter into humanity’s experience, offering His presence not only to people long ago but also to each of us today. Because Jesus is “God with us,” we can be assured that we are not alone in our struggles, fears, or uncertainties; God is present and actively involved in our lives, offering us hope, forgiveness, guidance, and love.
Matthew reminds us, by quoting the prophecy, that God’s promises are trustworthy and that He has made a way for us to know Him personally through Jesus. It’s an invitation to experience God’s love, no matter our circumstances, and to ground our faith in the reality that God keeps His word and is always with us.

Love Is The Secret Ingredient
Love is something chosen, not guaranteed. John Lennon’s biological parents were unable to give him a stable home. Instead, his aunt and uncle chose to love and raise him. That means, for John, love wasn’t just a biological or automatic thing – it was an act of will and commitment. The same thing is true for God’s love for us. It is an act of God’s will to love us sinners, even knowing who we are.

The idea behind the song “All You Need Is Love” is that love is the essential, saving force in life, not money, not status, not even conventional family structures. God understood this idea 2000 years ago. Even in the Christmas story, we often overlook Jesus’s blended family. It took Joseph’s love to demonstrate God’s love to Mary and Jesus.
When Love is Manifest, It Can Change the World
We know how Jesus changed the World, but God’s love continues to do so.
Mimi and George didn’t just give little John Lennon food and shelter; they gave him encouragement and culture through literature, art, and especially music.
Buying him a harmonica, a banjo, and a guitar are not minor details; they are acts of love that literally helped create The Beatles. Lennon’s later message that love transforms people and societies is rooted in the fact that love quite literally transformed his life from a potentially tragic orphan story into one of the most influential artistic careers in history. Each of us can recall a Beatles tune. I bet many of you have been quietly singing, “All you need is love… bum da dada da!” even while you are reading this article.

Love is a gift from God that heals wounds.
It is no secret that John Lennon was troubled in his personal life. He carried deep emotional wounds from abandonment and loss. Being embraced by Mimi and George didn’t erase his pain, but it kept him from being entirely consumed by it. When we hear him sing about love, there’s a sense that he knows the opposite of love—neglect, instability, fear. It is a rhetorical device that musicians have used to craft some of the greatest songs in history.
Understanding God’s love for us and knowing what Jesus gave for us on the cross provides the song “All You Need Is Love” more weight: it’s not a slogan from someone who had an easy life; it’s a plea and a conviction from someone who knew what it was like not to be fully loved by his parents.

Conclusion
John Lennon’s story—marked by abandonment, loss, and longing for love—mirrors the human condition in the aftermath of the fall. By our nature, we are marked by brokenness, instability, and fear, not only in our families but before a holy God. The ache we hear in Lennon’s music is, in many ways, an echo of a deeper spiritual reality: our hearts were made for a love we cannot secure or sustain on our own.
Enduring love does not begin with us, but with God. “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). The love Lennon longed for—and often missed in his childhood—is a faint shadow of the covenant love God shows in Christ: a love that chooses, pursues, and holds fast, not because we are worthy, but because God is gracious. In Jesus, the abandoned find adoption, the insecure find a sure foundation, and the unloved discover a love that will never let them go.
When Lennon sings, “All You Need Is Love,” he is closer to the truth than he knew—but not just any love. What we truly need is the steadfast, redeeming love of God revealed in the gospel. Only this love can bear the full weight of our hopes, heal wounds that run back to our earliest memories, and answer the fear of never being fully known or fully accepted.
So, Lennon’s plea can point us beyond itself. His life reminds us that human love, precious as it is, will always be fragile and incomplete. But even in an old rock-n-roll song, God directs us to the One whose love is neither fragile nor incomplete—in Christ, God takes orphans and makes them sons and daughters and meets our deepest abandonment with an unbreakable promise: “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” In the end, all we need is love—but that love has a name, a cross, and an empty tomb.
I will leave you to contemplate that love and the invitation it entails.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. AMEN.

Bibliography
Kenny, F. (2018). The Making of John Lennon. Bloomington, Indiana: Red Lighting Books.
NRSV Updated Edition Holy Bible. (2021). Holy Bible With Deuterocanonical/Apocryphal Books of the Old Testament, Updated Edition. Washington, D.C., USA: Zondervan.