by CCW | 2 March 2025 10:00
Such strong and yet compelling words. They shape the great Collect for today. Love is simply everything and without it we are simply nothing. What? How can that be? It is an extraordinary statement yet it goes to the very heart of the Christian Faith. Without love, we are nothing. But what is love?
It is an ancient and modern question, perhaps considered more deeply by the ancients than the moderns, but then you would expect me to say that, wouldn’t you? Plato treats the question in his famous dialogue, The Symposium. It belongs, I think, at least alongside or in a kind of reciprocal engagement with Paul’s great hymn to love in today’s Epistle. That would be a symposium par excellence! But what is the love that Paul celebrates? It is nothing less than the love of God, the divine love which seeks the perfection of our human loves. This is not an add on but the underlying truth of all our loves, of all love and desire. All love and desire is for the good but our seeking is only one part of the equation. For our seeking is something given by God. God moves our souls to seek what our souls most desire which is nothing less than God. God is love.
But you will protest in contemporary fashion: Isn’t love, love? Love is love? But that is to say nothing, a tautology. Love of what, in what way, and for what end?, we have to ask. Love is not static but dynamic. It is the desire or the eros of our souls, though the word Paul uses is not eros but agape, a love that signals more the unity of the human community, the love that is fellowship. The preceding chapter ends with the words: “I will show you a still more excellent way,” having exhaustively gone through an analysis of the human community by way of analogy with the unity of the parts of the body yet as belonging to something more. For “now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” All our human attempts at justice and right, about a unity of diversities, to put contemporary social justice and identitarian concerns in the most positive light, is ultimately and only found in God.
Divine charity perfects human charity; it is its true end and meaning. The true desire of our souls for the unity that unites all differences is accomplished and concluded in the divine fellowship. That unity of differences is not quite the same thing as “diversities,” which Andrewes points out is just “a heap of things,” indefinite and indeterminant. But love cannot be indifferent to the realities of our lives and the lives of those around us. Love indifferent is imperfect love. What is love if it doesn’t care?
On the other hand, there are the aggressive and possessive forms of love which are about caring too much, often in the wrong way, and sometimes about the wrong things. Against these, Paul says that “love seeks not its own.” It is not self-seeking but self-surrendering; in short, sacrificial. Love seeks the good of the other. Love in its truth is motion towards another, meaning the good of the other. But that immediately raises the problem about what we think is the good?
This brings us, I think, to the radical meaning of Lent as the pilgrimage of love, on the one hand, and the purgation of all our incomplete loves, on the other hand. They are intimately and essentially connected. There are, as George Herbert says “but two vast, spacious things” that we must consider. What are they? “Sin and love.”
They go together and belong to the pilgrimage of Lent. Divine love seeks our good in the awareness of the darkness of sin and evil. God makes something good out of our evil. Herbert in his poem, The Agonie, points to the Passion of Christ as the ultimate lesson in the meaning of sin and love. It reveals an essential feature of the whole pageant of Scripture. What Marilynne Robinson astutely observes about the Book of Genesis belongs to the whole story of God’s engagement with our humanity. It is really nothing less and nothing more than the reconciliation of the essential goodness of God and of creation itself with the darkest aspects of human experience. She suggests that Genesis never really ends but “is carried forward in the law, in the psalms, in the prophets” and certainly into the Christian scriptures. It is at once foundational and formative for the understanding of those “two vast, spacious things, sin and love.”
Genesis, she notes, is largely “framed by two stories of remarkable forgiveness, the forgiveness of Cain by the Lord, and of his ten brothers by Joseph.” They help us in our understanding of sin and love revealed in its greatest intensity in the Passion of Christ. The story of Joseph and his brothers is most poignant and touching and one which we read in the Offices immediately following Ash Wednesday. What she emphasizes in her reading of Genesis is divine restraint rather than divine retribution. The idea of revenge and retribution in terms of the ancient idea of Hammarabi’s code of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life,” is constantly questioned in Genesis but is not allowed to diminish the sanctity of human life as God-given. She highlights the paradox. “Adam kills Adam for killing Adam, an image of God destroys an image of God for having destroyed an image of God.” The story of the flood, she observes, ends not with the extinction of creation through our humanity’s abuse of existence but with the setting of the bounds of covenant and law around human conduct and behaviour.
It is, she says, “a given of the text that God is interested in human beings. If they are granted individuality, agency, freedom, meaningful existence as human beings, then God must practice almost limitless restraint.” Joseph, in making himself known to his brothers who had sought his harm, does not seek revenge but reconciliation. “Do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here,” he says to them, “for God sent me before you to preserve life” (Gen. 45. 5). It is a hard lesson for his brothers to comprehend having had to confront their own evil. They worry that after the death of their father Jacob, Joseph, now all powerful in Egypt, may then seek revenge and destroy them. But Joseph says to them in the final chapter of Genesis, “Fear not, for am I in the place of God?” he asks, though in a way he is. “As for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good” (Gen. 50.19,20). In other words, Joseph chooses to act as God acts – with restraint and with the overriding intention of reconciliation. As Robinson says, “To put aside power is Godlike.”
Is this not the divine love about which Paul sings? Charity, the englishing of the Latin caritas, is love. “Love,” he says, “seeks not its own.” Divine love seeks our good as found in God. Unlike our human loves, “charity never faileth” and always abideth. “Now abideth faith, hope and charity; but the greatest of these is charity.” It means more than almsgiving, and yet all works of charity are really the works of corporal mercy, acts of the body of Christ for the body of Christ and in the body of Christ. They are all acts of love which seek the good of one another in the abiding love of God, the motions of divine love at work in us.
Without that all our human loves and actions, from the greatest to the least, are nothing worth. Why? Because they are radically incomplete and utterly disconnected from the source of all goodness and truth. Charity unites our knowing, faith, and our willing, hope, and suggests that we already participate in the mystery of perfect love; “Love divine all loves excelling.” But only if we continue on the way of love, constantly seeking to learn the lessons of love in our lives. Like the brothers of Joseph, the lessons are not always easy to learn. They can only be learned through suffering and through the passionate desire for learning.
“Behold, we go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel. He explains “the things that shall be accomplished” there, the things of his Passion. Such are the lessons of love in the face of the full force of human sin. Yet “they understood none of these things.” How will we learn? Only if we go with Jesus to Jerusalem. That means discovering our blindness, our unknowing but that is precisely the beginning of the possibilities of learning and belongs entirely to the journey of love. We have to be like the blind man sitting by the way-side crying out to see. Like him we have to want to see, to learn, to know. In Paul’s terms it means wanting to see with the whole of our being, to “know even as we are known.” That is charity, the strong desire to know and to serve for that is to share in the same quality of love that God makes known to us in Christ’s sacrifice.
It means to ponder or to sound out the meaning of sin and love. Herbert points to Christ in Gethsemane and to the Cross. “Sinne is that presse and vice, which forceth pain/ to hunt his cruell food through ev’ry vein.” And love? He speaks of what flows out of the agony of the Cross for us and in which participate sacramentally. “Love is that liquor sweet and most divine, / Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.” This is the love without which we are nothing, yet the love with which we are everything.
Fr. David Curry
Quinquagesima 2025
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