Day: February 11, 2024

“Charity never faileth”

“Push come to shove/ It’s all about love. Or so it would seem in the great to and fro” of experience and life, as one of Bruce Cockburn’s songs in his latest album, O sun O moon, puts it. Well push has come to shove as we stand on the brink of Lent for which this Sunday wonderfully prepares us. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent and in a kind of Providential paradox it is also Valentine’s day! It’s all about love! But what do we mean by love? This Sunday teaches us about the divine love which redeems and perfects our human loves.

Lent concentrates the whole Christian pilgrimage to God into the span of forty days. It is a journey into light and understanding about the radical meaning of God’s love accomplished for us in Christ’s sacrifice. “We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus tells the disciples and us in today’s gospel. Jerusalem is the summit and symbol of human aspiration and desire for an absolute good or end. It is “Jerusalem which is above,” our heavenly end in God.

We know, at least in part, I suppose, what that going to Jerusalem means: the overcoming of all sin and evil in the Passion of Christ; in short, the free gift of Christ for us and for our wounded and broken humanity. It is altogether about the accomplishment of “all things written by the prophets concerning the Son of man,” as Jesus himself says. The challenge for us is to take a hold of that radical love of God revealed to us in the Passion of Christ. It is nothing less than learning and living the love of God in our lives. Jesus speaks about his Passion, death and resurrection but, as Luke puts it, “they understood none of these things,” for as yet they have not happened. We know about them after the fact but are here being given the interpretative means to understand exactly what they mean.

Paul’s great hymn to love complements and shapes the understanding of the journey to Jerusalem. It celebrates the eternal love of God made visible in Christ’s Passion. The love he is talking about is the divine love, the love which never faileth. Charity means love in its strongest sense. Caritas in the Latin carries over into English as charity and charity is more, though not less, than our compassion and outreach to those in need, the acts of charitable giving, as it were. Yet those acts are grounded in the deep love of God. The Greek word here is agape and belongs to the theology of amor, for the pilgrimage of the soul by love, with love, and to love, the love of God which is the true end and meaning of all our loves.

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