Sermon for the Second Sunday after Trinity
Hereby we know love
God invites us. “Come, for all things are now ready.” That is at once a privilege and a wonder. To what are we invited? To love imaged as a banquet but as signifying the real meaning of our lives. In the Christian understanding it is about our life in Christ. “Hereby we know love, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” The love in which we abide is sacrificial love. That love is active and alive in seeking the Good, the goodness of God and that self-same goodness for one another.
Do we accept the invitation? Do we embrace the demands, indeed, the commands of the divine love in which is all our good? Well, that is the problem and the challenge. It is the problem of sin. “But whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his heart against him: how dwelleth the love of God in him?” This is the problem of our indifference towards one another which separates us from the love of God, illustrated so powerfully for us in last Sunday’s parable, the parable of Lazarus and Dives. It is really all about what is alive in us.
Those lessons are again concentrated for us and developed more fully in this Sunday’s readings. The Epistle instructs but also convicts; the Gospel illustrates profoundly our refusals of the invitation to love and live yet emphasizes the divine commitment to our good. As such they are powerful persuasives to the truth of our lives in Christ.
The paradox is that we are commanded to love. This seems counter-intuitive. How can love be forced or coerced in us and still be love? It can’t. What we encounter is the absolute nature of God’s love as the truth for us. That love is constant and unconditional. It is not changed by our refusals; we are. We encounter simply what God seeks for us even in the face of our disorderly and distracted hearts. Yet “if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart.” It is one of the great teaching insights into the nature of God opened out to us in John’s First Epistle, itself a veritable treatise on love as Trinity and our abiding in that love. “And 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.” Notice the double emphasis on commandment. What does it mean? Simply that we should want what God wants for us.
