“‘The end of all things has drawn near’ is, further, the reality that generates and sustains the life of the messianic community in its exile. Freed from the deadly power of Gentile normal (4.3), God’s people are graciously given time to shape a new form of social, political, and economic life conformed to the life of Jesus Christ. Therefore the core and chief characteristic of the community… is ‘constant love for one another’ (4.8).
“By contrast to the kind of consuming and exploiting love that we once knew and practiced among the Gentiles, this is a love that always honors and seeks the good of the other. In fact, this is a ‘love [that] covers a multitude of sins’. Going beyond the kind of love that sees the good in others, this love unflinchingly acknowledges the sins of others and yet, absorbing the cost, ‘covers’ those sins over and over again (‘seventy times seven’; Mt 18.21-22) with grace and forgiveness, the same grace and forgiveness with which one’s own sins are covered by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, who ‘bore our sins in his body on the cross’ (1 Pet 2.24).
“Such radical, sin-covering love must be the rule of the community of Christ… The end of all things draws near to the messianic community, indeed, comes among it, in the self-offering, sin-covering love of Christ for the church and of it its members for one another. In this the kingdom of the Father comes, and his will is done on earth as in heaven.” [1. Douglas Harink, 1 &2 Peter Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2009), p. 113.]
