Day: June 2, 2024

“He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love”

The Gospel story of Lazarus and Dives, the rich man, is a profound illustration of the teaching of the Epistle reading from the 1st Letter of St. John. God is love is the meaning of the mystery of God as Trinity, the essential doctrine of the Christian Faith. It is not a puzzle to be solved but a mystery to be adored. Neither is it a human construct but the making known of God to us by God with us. What we behold in that door opened in heaven last week is what is to be lived in our lives. Thus we enter into the Trinity season, as it has come to be known, which presents a constellation of patterns, patterns upon patterns that circle around and into the mystery of God as Trinity, not unlike the circles of the Heavens in Dante’s Paradiso. “The love that moves the sun and the other stars” is the divine love which joins the varied forms of our humanity to God himself. The Trinity season emphasizes the connection between what is made known through revelation and how that it is to be lived in our lives.

The Epistle reading underscores for us the radical doctrine of the Trinity. The passage contains the core teaching that “God is love; and he that abideth or dwelleth in love abideth or dwelleth in God, and God in him.” This is a strong statement of living faith, our living in the mystery of God revealed. This love is not a transitory moment, here today and gone tomorrow; it is not about God tenting with us, as it were, but more emphatically dwelling or abiding in us, and thus, our abiding in God’s essential life. The simple point is that what is revealed is to be lived out in our lives; “because as he is, so are we in this world.” That, of course, is the great challenge and the real meaning of our spiritual pilgrimage. It is not just to God but with God and in God through the very motions of God himself alive in us. But how? Only by our attention to what is revealed and made known to us.

This is where the Gospel comes into play. It is an effective and powerful illustration of the importance and necessity of our attention to the things of God which if neglected result in our indifference and neglect of one another.

How we think about the world, as we have seen, changes how we think and deal with one another. As we have seen, the Passion and Resurrection of Christ is about the redemption of the world as gathered to God as opposed to seeing the world as something alien, something indifferent, something nauseating, and even something hostile or evil. That, in turn, changes how we see one another. The recurring theme has been about a change from fear and resentment of the world and one another to our joy and care towards one another. But this is equally true about how we think (or don’t think) about God; it affects how we think and deal with one another.

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