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The Catholic Telegraph
May 26, 2000The last two readings from First John that the Lectionary gives us are about love. This Sunday’s is principally about God’s love for us (and happens to fit nicely with the gospel reading for this day). Next Sunday’s is about our love for one another. However, as usual in this book of the New Testament, the author does not present a clear, linear treatment of a clearly identified theme. Everything he talks about is mixed up with something else. This is due in part to the writer’s limited literary skill, but also to the fact that the things of God are not generally clear and linear, but tend to be linked together in such a way that one thing necessarily leads to another. We can start anywhere we please and eventually reach every aspect of God’s revelation.
If this Sunday’s reading were to be re-written in a clearer and more logical way, it might turn out to be something like what follows. One of the most basic characteristics of God is loving, the giving of one’s self. God has shown His love to the world by sending the Son to make up for our deficiencies ("expiation for our sins") and reunite us to Himself. Our love for one another is a response to God’s initiative of love in our regard and is a consequence of the life of Christ we share thanks to His redemption of us. Just as godliness and loving and self-giving are all linked together in God, so also they are linked together in us. Loving is a sign of knowing God and being like Him. Not loving is an indication of detachment from God and dissimilarity to Him.
There are three pivotal points of Christian revelation inherent in this short selection from First John.
The first is that God is a God of love. In the history of human thought and human religious experience, people have looked on God in many different ways. Some have seen Him as the benevolent clock maker who wound things up and walked away, leaving creation to unwind according to the plan He set for it, but not taking any day to day interest in it in the meantime. Some have seen God as the fierce warlord who will lead His people to victory over their enemies provided they have made appropriate sacrifices to keep him happy. Some, closer to home, have seen God as the bookkeeper who keeps careful watch on us, scrupulously noting down all our good and bad deeds so that He can close out our account quickly and efficiently when we finally stand before Him in judgement. The real God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, isn’t like any of that. He is a loving Father who cares for His creatures, who invites them to be like Him, who goes to great - some say ridiculous - lengths to insure their eternal happiness in His company.
The second pivotal point of Christian revelation presented in this Sunday’s reading is that God has intervened in human history. At a certain specific point in time, God determined to clean up the mess that human beings had made of the world He had given them. He came into their midst in the person of God the Son who became a specific human being and lived in a specific place and spoke specific words and experienced certain specific events in His lifetime. Jesus is not some faceless everyman, an abstraction based on philosophical speculation about human nature or about God. Jesus is a real, distinct, one of a kind human being who entered human history as an expression of God’s love to carry out a clearly defined mission of salvation.
These two truths of revelation are among the most fundamental realities that distinguish Christian belief from every other religious faith, every other religious philosophy. Belief in and commitment to a loving and a saving God, a God who became and remains part of human history, are essential components of the Christian faith.
The third pivotal point of Christian belief (and life) that this reading provides is something that has already appeared in our live letters, but which bears frequent repetition. It is a consequence of God’s love and God’s project of salvation. Our love for God, our service of God, our obedience to God are not ways of compelling some positive response from God, but themselves derive from the action that God has already taken on our behalf. In sending His Son to be our redeemer, our loving Father has taken the initiative. Anything that the most godly and most generous of us can offer Him is a response, an answer to God’s prior undertaking. The gift of ourselves that we offer to God, the sharing of ourselves that we offer to our brothers and sisters is all derivative from God’s previous gift of Himself to us. "This is love: not that we have loved God, but that He has loved us." Any approach to God that does not take that into account is simply erroneous.
It all hangs together, not just in the foggy prose of the author of First John but in our grasp of Christian revelation: faith, love, obedience to God’s commandments - not three disjointed articles of belief but one consistent insight to guide us to salvation.
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Conversation Questions
How do I experience God’s love for me?
How have I responded to God’s gift of salvation in Christ?
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