Our gospel today is taken from the Farewell Discourse of Jesus, his address to his disciples before leaving for the garden of Getsemini and his betrayal. He is making it clear to them that it will fall to them to take up where he leaves off. To them will fall the task of preaching the word. But the primary mode of preaching will be the way they will live their lives: "I give you a new commandment: love one another as I have loved you; by this everyone will know that you are my disciples." We are to love one another as he has loved us. 'Love one another as I have loved you.' This is how St. John summarises the life of Jesus and the teachings he left us. This love for us was fully revealed when He sent his only Son into the world so that we might have life through him.'
This is how John summarises the core of Christian teaching. But in summarising something, we necessarily simplify it. 'What is truth?' Pilate asked Jesus at his trial. He might well have asked, 'What is love?' Because love is as elusive as truth. The way we use the term in our every day lives will show us how elusive this term really is. We love football, we love a swim, we love a good meal, we love music, we love a good book, we love our parents, we love our children, we love the good old days, we fall in love, we make love, we fall out of love, we love God. We use the same word to denote a whole range of activities, attachments, hobbies, devotions and emotions. It the love of God just another ingredient thrown into our everyday stew? Does it spice up the rest of our lives, or does it blend into every thing else and not over-assert itself?
St. Thomas Aquinas held that grace built on nature, that there is a consistency between the our world and the world of God. After all, it was through becoming human that he saved us. Human experience then will give us some insight into the life and love of God. But that human experience must be qualified and purified before we can see its as revealing God to us. Because, given our nature, that which we quickly identify as pure love is, on closer examination, merely self-love in disguise. By our nature, we are all restless; we carry within our beings an emotional emptiness to one degree or another. This is an essential part of our heritage. That emptiness craves its fulfilment, literally. For the vast majority of people, that emptiness will be addresses by a potential partner, someone who alleviates that emptiness or renders it more tolerable. This common human experience we refer to as 'falling in love'. Exclusiveness is an emotional requirement of this level of relationship. In common culture this form of love is seen as the highest, the most desirable form. But, of its nature, its is transient, temporary. It will either burn itself out or go on to develop into something deeper and more stable.
Is this the type of love we mean when we speak of God's love for us? Does it teach us anything about God's love? The scriptures certainly speak of God's love for his people as a great passion. He is passionately interested in his people and cares for them. But this model does have problems. In our first reading today Peter gives us his insight: "The truth I have some to realise is that God does not have favourites." So the exclusiveness we associate with romantic love is not a feature in God's love. Furthermore, romantic love is transient; God's love is constant, it is there regardless of our indifference and lack of response.
The other great biblical image put forwards is parental love, paternal or maternal. This seems to be a more promising image in that it is very common for parents to put the interests of their children before themselves and their own interests. But, again, human motivation is very elusive and very difficult to pin down. You sometimes hear parents say that they will not repeat the mistakes made by their own parents. Consequently, the whole project of rearing their own children may be a rerunning of their own tape, with cumbersome attempts to edit out the damaged bits.
Of course the various forms of love that I have mentioned will all give us some inkling of what God's love for us means, and what Christian love means. We are not born with a quality called love. There is nothing spontaneous about it. Love is a habit, a way of life, a set of attitudes and responses that are learned over many years. Love is something that cannot be learned alone, in isolation. We pick up various ingredients as we advance along the road from childhood to adulthood. And two of today's readings highlight the most important and most unpalatable ingredient of love, that is forgiveness. Forgiveness redeems Christian love from mawkish sentimentality. Because if we fail to forgive, wallowing instead in our resentment, we destroy not the object of our resentment, but ourselves. As we seethe with futile anger, the world passes us by. Unless we ourselves have trained ourselves in forgiving others, we will not ourselves have the capacity to receive forgiveness. In other words, unless we ourselves are familiar with forgiveness in our own experience, we will not recognise it when it is offered us, by God or our fellow christians.
What Christ has to say about forgiveness and love applies to our personal inner lives, to our domestic lives and indeed to the way men and women throughout the world relate to each other. Whether we are talking about family life, about our relationship, or about international political dealings, resentment and anger are corrosive, destructive elements. To love as Christ loved means first and foremost to learn to forgive.
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