“Love is of God”
The Trinity celebrates the fullness of God’s Revelation. It gathers up the whole pageant of what God has revealed of himself to us into the proclamation of God’s own self-identity. God is Trinity: the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, the three-in-one and the one-in-three. “The Father is God, the Son God, the Holy Ghost God; And yet there are not three Gods, but one God” (Athanasian Creed, BCP, p. 696). Such is the mystery of God. It is the essential heart of the Christian faith. The mystery lies in what has been shown to us.
It is all the vision of God. It is all God teaching us and all our thinking upon what God has taught us; “let [us] thus think of the Trinity” (Athanasian Creed). “I saw the Lord,” says Isaiah, recounting his vision of God, “in the year that King Uzziah died” (Isaiah 6.1). “I saw and behold, a door was opened in heaven,” says St. John in his Revelation, his recounting of what had been shown to him to proclaim to us (Rev. 4.1). “We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen,” says Jesus to Nicodemus, for so are we taught of “heavenly things” (John 3.11,12).
He is the teacher and not simply a teacher “come from God” like Moses and the Prophets, as Nicodemus supposes. For “these signs that thou doest” are not done simply because “God is with him”. And what about those Old Testament books of ancient war stories and political intrigue? What are we to learn from them? We are to learn of God’s good providence made known through the events of nations and the actions of persons, however contrary to worldly expectations and however hidden to ordinary perceptions. Israel had to learn what it means to be God’s people. Israel had to learn what it means to live under the word and in the will of the God who had made himself known to her. Israel had to learn what it means to be brought up in the steadfast fear and love of God. And so do we.
Obedience to God’s Word has to be learned. It is the condition of our being in the kingdom of God. It means attending to God’s Word, hearing it with the intention of acting upon what we hear.
We must learn to live the greater vision shown to us in Jesus Christ. “This is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, as he gave us commandment” (I John 3.23). We have to learn to live the vision of God. It is really the purpose of God’s Church – to betroth us to the God who has unlocked the treasures of his love to us. The vision is all a love-song in which we take our delight. It is what the poets capture best.
St. John, in his first epistle, emphatically and repeatedly drives the message home to us. We hear about the necessity of brotherly love as arising out of the love of God towards us. “In this was manifested the love of God towards us, because that God sent his only-begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him” (I John 4.9). We hear of the divine commandment to love one another as arising out of the love that is God himself: “God is love and he that abideth in love abideth in God” (I John 4.16). The love that is God has been made known to us in Jesus Christ. “Hereby we know love because he laid down his life for us” (I John 3.16). The doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation are implicated in each other and include the doctrine of our Redemption. But the vision has to be lived. Because God is love and because this has been made known to us, God’s commandment to love is our necessity. The commandment to love belongs to God’s nature, on the one hand, and to the perfection of our wills, on the other.
The poet and priest George Herbert (1593 – 1633) sings what he himself loved and lived. To live the vision is endless delight. And such is the real summer of our lives.
Thou hast but two rare cabinets full of treasure,
The Trinitie, and Incarnation:
Thou hast unlockt them both,
And made them jewels to betroth
The work of thy creation
Unto thy self in everlasting pleasure.
“Love is of God”
Fr. David Curry
AMD Service of the Deaf
June 22, 2014