How
do we learn that? Slowly and with
difficulty, if you’re like me. But miracles happen. There’s a favourite painting of mine by the
19th century German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. It shows a woman standing in a field gazing
at the rising sun. She’s silhouetted
against the sun and you’re standing behind her, so you can’t see the sun
itself, only the clear clean light with which it’s bathing the landscape. In a beautiful gesture, she’s lifting her
face up to the sun’s rays and spreading out her hands towards it like a priest,
as if saying ‘yes’ to life. It’s an image of love pouring into the soul. Love comes to us as a sunrise of wonder that
prises us open, bathes us in a new light.
Love meets our deepest hungers and desires. We spend all our lives looking for it,
sometimes in ways that are destructive and obsessive. But as St Augustine
learned, even the sins of passion are really loves that have become twisted in
the wrong direction. But the gospel, he says, baptises our loves, purifies
disordered desires, turns our longings round to face the sunrise and find their
right focus in God. Even at their most troubled or exploitative, our
relationships can still point to what is lacking in the way we love:
acceptance, generosity, self-giving, laying down our lives for our friends,
says Jesus, which is how God in Christ loves us. At their most fulfilled, they
are a foretaste of heaven. A Graham
Greene character says that God is ‘all loves and relationships combined in an
immense and yet personal passion’. With
that passion, says St. John, God so loved the world.
It is easy to be platitudinous about love, focus on good
feelings and warm glow. We clergy are especially good at that. So it’s
important to pay attention to how Jesus defines love, gives it shape and
character. There is only one test of
love, he says; and it is this: to lay down your life for your friends. If you
can’t contemplate dying for someone, it’s arguable that you haven’t truly begun
to live for them out of love. It’s worth
reflecting whom we would dare to die for, what would impel us to give up our
lives for someone else. For most, it is
those whom God has given us to be intimate with: family, close friends. These loves have clearly defined human
faces. For some it is love of nation and
homeland: ‘the love that asks no questions, the love that stands the test’ as
the hymn puts it. For others again, it
is a genuinely altruistic love for the weak and vulnerable of our world who have
little hope in life other than because of those who, literally or figuratively,
lay down their life for them in love and service. Whichever it is, this is the test Jesus
applies. To love one another is to be
committed to going wherever it leads, even to the point of death. This is what it is to ‘love one another as I
have loved you’.
And the point of this is that Jesus does not only
speak about love but embodies it. In the upper room where he and the disciples
are gathered, he has just laid aside his robe in order to wash their feet, just
as a song in one of Paul’s letters tells how he laid aside his glory in order
to take to himself the humble role of a slave.
And within a few hours, he will be arrested and tried and led out to die
a criminal’s death. And all for us,
every human child: that is the measure of love that it goes right to the
end. It is cruciform, has the shape of a
cross. St Paul puts it like this: ‘God
proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for
us’.
What Jesus is saying is that fundamentally, love is
always sacrificial, self-emptying, giving its all and giving it to the
end. Love’s endeavour, love’s expense is
that it gives everything, withholds nothing, lays itself down for the sake of
others. We don’t need to be told when we are loved like this. We know it whether it is in our marriages or
friendships, or in the care we received when we most needed it. We know it when we observe how the extent of
people’s commitment takes them to the most vulnerable people in our society and
to the most desperate in our world. Above
all we know it when we gaze upon Jesus on the cross and find ourselves looking
straight into the face of God.
God’s love is always moving among and between us and
bathes this world in light. As Julian of Norwich said, we only exist at all
because God loves us: creation is the evidence that God is love. In all our stories, we glimpse how God so
loved that he gave, and so loves that he goes on giving, laying down his life
for his friends which is how he meets and embraces us. It happens in every act
of healing care and compassion we know.
It happens when reconciliation brings together broken peoples and
communities and mends them. It happens
when our hearts are glad because some beautiful piece or a poem or painting has
touched us. It happens in the greeting
of a friend and the touch of someone we love.
It happens at the altar in the visible words of love: bread and wine,
taken, blessed, broken and given. In all
these ways, and a thousand others, each moment, each hour, each day, love comes
to us and we glimpse its meaning, God’s
meaning. And we begin to understand the
deep magic of the universe that as Dante said, it is ‘love that moves the sun
and the other stars’.
John 15.9-17
No comments:
Post a Comment