“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.”
1 St John 3
The message of the Church’s liturgical year is a very simple
lesson, and a very direct one; “Believe in Jesus Christ and love one another,”
yet it seems to take us at least a life-time to learn it. The essence of the
message is summed up by St John in the Epistle lessons for the first two Sundays
after Trinity: “In this was manifested the love of God towards us”, he says,
“because that God sent his only-begotten Son into the world that we might live
through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he first loved us,
and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”
That is the first point of all our celebrations: that we
should catch a glimpse of the manifest love of God, and be refreshed and
elevated – “reborn” – by that vision. “No one has seen God at any time”: for
the natural man, God is the great unknown, the power beyond, the mysterious
principle of all existence. To know God in that way, as the infinite power
governing the cosmos, is surely a noble knowledge, and also a tragic knowledge.
But to know God as love is something far different. To know that the eternal
principle moving and governing all things is the divine love manifest is a
transforming knowledge, a knowledge which changes us. To know that God is love
is to see everything with new eyes, a “new heaven and a new earth”; it is to be
spiritually “re-born”, to be saved from fear and hopelessness.
In Jesus Christ, the love of God is manifest: “God so loved
the world that he gave his only-begotten Son.” That is the starting-point of
our salvation, that we should believe that revelation of God’s love; or, as St
John puts it, “that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ.”
That belief, that recognition, of God’s love is the
starting-point: “Hereby we know love, because he laid down his life for us.” We
know love; and it is our destiny and vocation to be transformed by that love, to
realise it and fulfill it in our lives. And there is St John’s second point:
our recognition of God’s love is to be expressed in our lives with one another.
Thus we are commanded to believe in Jesus Christ and to love one another.
And it is important to see that this transformation of
ourselves in realising and expressing God’s love is not something which just
spontaneously happens. God’s love is the seed of new life, sown in our souls,
and it must be cherished, and nurtured and cultivated. Sometimes, alas, we give
it only the barren and rocky soul of neglect; sometimes we choke it with thorns
and thistles of worldly preoccupations, and the new life of the spirit withers
and decays within us. That is the point of the Parable of the Great Supper, in
today’s Gospel: God’s love is like an invitation; he bids us “come, for all
things are now ready; and they all with one consent began to make excuse.” Good
excuses, no doubt, at least in worldly terms, and we could probably add to the
list almost indefinitely. But with this invitation, no excuses will do. It is
the Son of God who comes to call us to the heavenly banquet of God’s
friendship. Surely refusal is unthinkable; yet how often we manage to do it!
During this long season of Trinity, the concern of the
Church’s teaching is our response to that invitation: “Come, for all things are
now ready.” We are concerned with the nurture and cultivation of our new life,
individually and institutionally. St John, in today’s Epistle, speaks of the
signs of that life in us: “We know that we have passed from death to life,
because we love the brethren.” The love of God in us is manifest in our love
for one another – our active goodwill and benevolence: not just in feeling, or
superficial emotion, not just “in word, neither in tongue, but in deed and in
truth.” “Hereby we know that he abideth in us, by the Spirit which he hath
given us.” Thus, our recognition of God’s love has its necessary expression in
our love of one another; and without that expression, we know that the
recognition is counterfeit.
Thus, we are commanded to believe the revelation of God’s
love in Jesus Christ, and commanded to express that love for one another.
Perhaps it is one of the most surprising aspects of all this that St John keeps
speaking in terms of commandments: we are commanded to believe in Jesus Christ,
and commanded to love one another. To many of us, perhaps that seems a very
strange way of putting it. After all, people either believe, or they don’t;
they either love one another or they don’t. How can such things be commanded?
The commandment to love seems especially strange: we’re used to thinking of
love as something spontaneous, something that just happens. It is an
experience. One “falls in love”. What sense does it make to command it?
But St John’s approach is more realistic than our
conventional modern attitudes about the spontaneity of belief and love. Our
beliefs and loves do not simply “happen”; they pertain to a character long
formed by a long process of training and habituation. And that process always
begins with commandment and obedience. Just as our natural life has its
formation in obedience to parents and teachers, so our spiritual life has its
formation in obedience to God’s word. There is, of course, a spiritual
maturity, when our beliefs and our loves are spontaneously right. That is the
condition we call “sanctity”. But that is the end, not the beginning; our
beginning is obedience and commandment, and the commandment is twofold: “That
we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, as
he gave us commandment.”
