One of the most annoying and silly tropes I hear from fellow Christians these days goes like this: Hate the sin, love the sinner.
The idea here is that we can, with surgical precision, make a cut between our affections toward human persons and how we feel about their behaviors. But such surgical precision is untenable. And we know this. It's incredibility hard to not let a person's behaviors affect how we feel about him or her.
That's because what this line fails to see: Sinners sin. What matters isn't the sin. It's the label. If all you see is a sinner, you're seeing the wrong thing.
Jesus gets at how silly this mentality is. Because Jesus envisions -- as I've written here before -- a holiness that isn't afraid to get dirty. Jesus embraces sinners and tax collectors and prostitutes.
Which is another way of saying Jesus got soft on sin.
When we love sinners, there's this really real sense that we see the person first, not the sin. Sin is no longer the focal point. We've changed our filter and the person takes priority.
All of this to say: God's love -- and therefore our love -- is never "pure". Any genuine love overlooks wrongs. Things get blurry and messy in the heart when you genuinely affectionately love. Love has to get dirty.
Or as Bonhoeffer so eloquently put it in his Ethics: "Just as God's love entered the world, thereby submitting to the misunderstanding and ambiguity that characterize everything worldly, so also Christian love does not exist anywhere but in the worldly, in an infinite variety of concrete worldly action, and subject to misunderstanding and condemnation. Every attempt to portray a Christianity of 'pure' love purged of worldly 'impurities' is a false purism and perfectionism that scorns God's becoming human and falls prey to the fate of all ideologies. God was not too pure to enter the world".