Christ Church

“This commandment have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also”

“You have the poor with you always, and whensoever you will you may do them good,” Jesus famously says. But what do we will? It is a disturbing statement. What does it mean? What we will is what we love or desire and what we love or will is inescapably bound up with what we see and know in some sense or other. And what we do or do not do with the poor and with one another belongs to our knowing and loving God. That is the point and the challenge of this day.

The Epistle reading from 1 John 4. 7-21 is a theological tour-de-force. It highlights the mystery of the Trinity for us in our lives together with one another. How? By the necessary interplay of knowing and loving in God and that interplay in turn in our knowing and loving. “He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love” (1 Jn. 4.8). “God sent his only-begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him” (1 Jn. 4.9). “Hereby know we that we dwell in him, and he in us; because he hath given us of his Spirit” (1 John 4. 13). Everything is grounded in the mutual indwelling of God as Trinity. We live in the knowing love of God. Our loving is our knowing and vice versa.

The mystery of the Trinity perplexes us, perhaps. We may look askance at it because the images of God as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit may seem to be mere metaphors that reflect social and political power structures of our devising. This would assume that we make God in our own image and not the other way around. Yet last Sunday made us think upwards not downwards; that is the true meaning of thinking analogically. Father, Son and Holy Ghost or Spirit are not metaphors; they are the names of God revealed by Jesus which open us to the mystery of God as love. “We have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth (or abideth) in love, dwelleth (or abideth) in God, and God in him” (1 Jn. 4. 16).

This statement governs our thinking and doing especially in the Trinity season. It governs how we see and deal with one another. “This commandment,” John tells us, “have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also” (1 Jn 4. 21). And our “brother” is the other who is inescapably one with us in our common humanity. The brother is the one whom we see and know in some sense or other and whom we are therefore commanded to love. This is a strong ethical imperative, the radical meaning of which is illustrated in the Gospel parable of Dives or the Rich Man, and Lazarus, the poor man.

While the poor man/rich man dichotomy reflects social and economic realities, the paradox of the parable is that it reverses them. The poor man turns out to be rich, and the rich man poor but only because the parable shows that the truth of our humanity is not found simply in matters of material wealth but in how we see and love one another. That turns entirely on our knowing and loving God.

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This video was taken at Christ Church, 12 June 2016, at a service in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Laying Up of the Colours of the 112th Battalion.