“Herein is love”
“Our life and our death are with our neighbour,” says St. Anthony the Great, according to Athanasius’ biography of the Desert Father. Anthony was an important figure in the development of Christian monasticism. Heaven and Hell, we might also say, are with with one another. Today we are given a vision of both in the Epistle and Gospel. Heaven is the love of God in us in our love for one another and Hell is our indifference to one another and thus to God.
How we think about death and dying says everything about how we think and deal with one another. The great pageant of literature and philosophy which presents us with the images of the after-life are entirely about life itself and about how we think and live with one another. That is really the main point about such great works of literature like The Epic of Gilgamesh in Enkidu’s vision of the afterworld as the house of dust, Homer’s Odyssey in Odysseus’ journey to Hades to speak with Teiresias, Plato’s Myth of Er in the Republic, Vergil’s sixth book of the Aeneid, St. John the Divine’s Revelation, Dante’s great summa, The Divine Comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Goethe’s Faustus, the novels of Charles Williams, and many, many more. They are really profound teachings about our humanity in its relation to God and to one another. Such teachings are wonderfully concentrated for us in John’s little treatise on love in his First Epistle and in Luke’s profoundly poignant Gospel story about Dives, the rich man, and Lazarus, the poor man.
That there is a kind of role reversal in the Gospel highlights the significance of our thoughts and actions towards one another. As we saw last Sunday with Nicodemus, we have to learn to think upward, to think into the things of God. The rich man utterly ignores Lazarus lying “at his gate full of sores,” hungry and destitute, bereft of human company. It is the dogs who “came and licked his sores,” the dogs who show the compassion and charity that humans ought to show to one another. In his indifference to Lazarus, the Gospel suggests, there is equally an utter indifference to God, to the truth of our lives as lived with God and with one another. That indifference is nothing short of Hell. The Gospel highlights the “great gulf fixed” between heaven and hell. In our refusals to love one another, we separate ourselves from the love of God, the love that John saysis God. Hell is our refusal to let that love live in us.
These lessons follow directly and rightly upon the celebration of the mystery of the Trinity, the mystery of God as love: not just our love for God, not just God’s love for us, but God as love. In the Epistle we have the familiar mantra of the Trinity Season. “God is love and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God in him,” as found in our liturgy as one of the sentences for the Offices. The King James Version uses “dwelleth” for “abideth.” Without that love, we are nothing. We are Hell.
All this speaks to our assumptions about life after death in which we invariably project our temporal and everyday hopes into something that will happen after we die. But that often misses the point and negates the real meaning of our lives now which are about our being with God. Eternity is the now of which time is but the moving image. We live ‘now’ in the eternal now of God however incompletely and imperfectly.
The ancient philosopher, Heraclitus, wonderfully observes that “the way up and the way down are the same.” The way to the principle and the way from the principle are simply about our life with God. That is the point of both the Epistle and the Gospel. They emphasize the reality of our life with God through our lives with one another. The nature and meaning of the union of the love of God and the love of neighbour which we hear in the Summary of the Law are illustrated in the Gospel story and explicated in the Epistle.
This grounding of our lives with one another in the life and love of God is our freedom and our dignity. It is the meaning of the communion of saints, the meaning of our communion in the communion of the Trinity. This is essential life and apart from it, nada, nothing. The mystery of God as love is made known to us in the words of the Scripture, both law and Gospel, we might say. The Old and the New Testament testify to the reality of our life with God which is the point of the strong words in the parable which Jesus tells. “If they hear not Moses, and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead,” he says. This is a strong affirmation of the law understood in its fullness as love.
But if we ignore it? That indifference to one another is our indifference to the one in whose image we are made. That is the difference between heaven and hell. The parable suggests that Lazarus, lying half-dead at the gate of the rich man, is poor in material terms but not spiritually. He is, it seems, open to the things of God which the rich man is not. This leads to the role reversal of Lazarus, “carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom,” an image of heaven, “being “comforted,” and the rich man in Hades, Hell, “being in torments.”
This is not about trying to scare us into the Church, into religious faith and life, scaring us to God, as it were. “There is no fear in love,” John tells us. Why? Because there is trust. Faith is not simply about subscribing to a set of propositions; it is about our trust in God. But that is something about which we have to be mindful, the mystery which we have to think and live. It is the defining struggle of our lives. It means to live in the mystery of the God who is love and without whose love we cannot love. “We love him because he first loved us,” because he is love in himself and for us. That love is the very condition of our lives. “If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us,” as John says and adds that we know “that we dwell with him, and he in us; because he hath given us of his Spirit,” recalling us to the whole movement of God as Trinity into which life we are being gathered, now and always, and not merely ‘hereafter’ in some sort of ‘by and by’ like ‘pie in the sky’. God’s love is now and always.
“Ubi caritas est et amor, deus ibi est.”“Where there is charity and love, there is God,” an ancient hymn says. “Christ’s love has gathered us into one,” the hymn goes on to say, “gather[ing] us into one body … so that we may see and be with the blessed ones,” the saints. Set to a beautiful Gregorian Chant, it is sometimes used at the foot-washing ceremony as part of the liturgy of Maundy Thursday and in the liturgies of eucharistic devotion such as Benediction. It is sometimes sung, too, at the Feast of Corpus Christi, the Thursday after Trinity Sunday which celebrates Christ’s institution of the Holy Eucharist as the ordained means of our abiding in his body, “corpus Christi”. Such things underscore the fundamental point about our being one in the love of God, being one in the body of Christ through our love for one another.
God’s love gathers us into his love. That is the meaning of our eucharistic liturgy as belonging to our life with God. At funerals, I often end the burial office with the In Paradisum, a prayer that draws explicitly upon these lessons and teaching. It is really all about our life in the mystery of God’s love.
Into the Paradise of God may the Angels lead thee; and at thy coming may the Martyrs receive thee, and take thee into the holy City Jerusalem. May all the Choirs of Angels welcome thee; and with Lazarus once a beggar, may God grant thee rest eternal. Amen.
“Herein is love.”
Fr. David Curry
The First Sunday after Trinity
June 3rd, 2018