"so why is it Good Friday?"

- question asked, off-handedly, by a friend to me yesterday.

The sentence "God is love" is to be read with the emphasis on the word God, whereas we have fallen into the habit of emphasizing the word love.

God is love; that is to say not a human attitude, or a conviction, or a deed, but God himself is love.

Only he who knows God knows what love is; it is not the other way around. It is not that we first of all by nature know what love is and therefore know also what God is. No one knows God unless God reveals Himself to him. And so no one knows what love is except in the self-revelation of God. Love, then, is the revelation of God.

And the revelation of God is Jesus Christ. "This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him" (I John 4:9).

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, quoted in How Great Thou Art.