by CCW | 23 October 2011 14:44
“Religion,” a comedian once said, “is only guilt with different holidays”. No doubt there is something in the comment. No doubt sin and guilt are among the great commonplaces of religion and especially of the Christian religion.
Right up there with sin and guilt is another great and important Christian commonplace, that much used, much abused, much confused, big, little word, ‘love’, so commonplace as to be found plastered even on bumpers! “Smile, God loves you”. No doubt, it is terribly well-meant, but I wonder whether it evokes anything more than either cute sentimentality or aesthetic revulsion! However nice smiles may be, even as frozen upon the faces of God’s chosen frozen, the love of God, surely, does not reduce itself to mere smiles and happy faces! Love in the gospels, I venture to say, is not about niceness, however nice that might seem to be! It was once complained about a friend of mine that he was not nice, to which he replied “God is not nice and neither am I,” which actually was quite true.
Love constrains us to speak of love. It seems such a commonplace thought. Yet, I wonder if we do not altogether miss the absolutely extraordinary thing about this commonplace. I wonder if we do not altogether fail to see how special, how precious, how extraordinary Christ’s lesson is for us here in this gospel. It goes to the heart of the matter, to the heart that was willing to be pierced and broken for you and for me, indeed, for the whole world.
Two things are extraordinary and noteworthy here. First, God commands us to love him. Secondly, Christ unites the love of God and the love of neighbour in himself. At first glance, such things may not seem so amazing. After all, they are words which we frequently hear: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord; and thou shalt love the Lord thy God”. “Hear the Word”, says the one who is the Word of God himself.
To hear that Word is to be Israel, a people who are open to the Word of God, who are defined by that Word as a people of the Law. They come to be by that Word spoken in the Burning Bush, by that Word passing over them to free them from Pharaoh’s bitter yoke, by that Word delivering them from the Red Sea waters, by that Word sustaining them in the wilderness wanderings, by that Word establishing God’s will and covenant towards them in the Law. That self-same Word now proclaims that “the Lord our God is one Lord”. That unity is no mere oneness, no empty aloneness. It is fullness and the completeness of the divine life in itself. As Aquinas remarks, “the perfection of Christian life consists in charity”. That charity begins and ends with God.
God commands us to love him. This is the first extraordinary thing and indeed, in the face of the current distresses within the global human community – the community that is ever at war within itself especially when it forgets the divine ground of our immediate being – such things need desperately to be remembered and pondered. God commands us to love him. Does this mean that God stands in need of our love? That he is perhaps jealous for our love? Surely not. Better to say God is not jealous but zealous for our perfection. Thus, the command to love God springs from no insufficiency or lack on God’s part. It is, instead, the expression of his pure activity and essential character.
“The cause of every good that comes to us is God and his love” (Aquinas). No doubt, love is a commonplace but the charity or love of God is far more than the sentimental journeyings of the heart, far more than emotional contentment, far more than the simperings of psychological self-satisfaction. No. To love is to seek the good of another, to seek their true and objective character; in short, to seek the perfection of the beloved. Do we seek God’s good in loving God? Not as if he lacked any good but as seeking the perfection of his will in us.
The fuller implications of this first extraordinary think appear in the second. Christ unites the love of God and the love of neighbour, even as he is himself the union of God and man. And out of a myriad of Levitical Laws, Christ takes hold of the love of neighbour as “the second like unto the first” which he quotes from Deuteronomy. This couplet of love literally sums up the entire Old Testament. It is summed up in Christ himself. The perfection of Christian life – soul, mind and body – consists in the charity of Christ.
The love of God embraces the love of neighbour. “It is”, as Augustine puts it, “from the one and the same love that we love God and our neighbour. God, however, for his own sake; ourselves and our neighbours for God’s sake.” St. Luke gives us a picture of that love in the Parable of the Good Samaritan; Mark shows us the real thing: Christ on the road to Calvary. The divine commandment to love finds its ultimate fulfillment and truest expression in the cross of Christ. We come to the altar of love, after all, only by way of the rood of Christ’s passion. In him the love of God and the love of neighbour are made perfect. As the poet John Donne puts it:
Wilt thou love God, as he thee? Then digest,
My Soule, this wholesome meditation…
’Twas much that man was made like God before,
But, that God should be made like man, much more.
Such are the extraordinary things contained in the commonplaces. We find here the two hands of God’s love: the commandment to love God and the fulfillment of love in the sacrifice of Christ, for “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son”. In him we find the perfection of charity and in him we find the way of perfecting grace in our lives. The commandment to love God is our “wholesome meditation”.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XVIII, 2011
8:00am
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