How Can God Love Sinners?

Carl Anderson looks to a certain German theologian for the answer in Civilization of Love:

In a sermon given in 1964, Father Joseph Ratzinger said this:

For love, as it is here portrayed as the content of being a Christian, demands that we try to live as God lives. He loves us, not because we are especially good, particularly virtuous, or of any great merit, not because we are useful or even necessary to him; he loves us not because we are good, but because he is good....To love in the Christian sense means trying to follow in this path...  (pg. 148)