God is love…….…. God is love.
This wonderful insight,
articulated by St John in that second reading,
is one of the high points of his theological reflection.
It really gets to the core of what was revealed
through and in Jesus.
John didn’t say ‘God is loving’,
if he had said that
he would have been reiterating a message
that runs through scripture.
He went much further:
not just ‘God is loving’: ‘God is love’.
This insight, this revelation,
must provoke us to ask
‘love’: what is love?
Not, what is its definition,
not, what can I say about it,
but, what do I know of it,
what do I understand by it?
How does the word ‘love’ connect with my own life,
with my personal history?
How do I have a sense of what ‘love’ means?
Now some say there is a difficulty here:
that the word ‘love’ in English
has some meanings that will mislead us
when we want to reflect on
God is love.
There is some truth in this.
The word is sometimes used
as an extravagant way of expressing
desire and enjoyment: as in
‘I love chocolate’ or ‘I love holidays’.
Actually, I think there is an argument
that, out of respect for the word’s deeper senses,
Christians should avoid using the word in this way.
There is also some nervousness about
what might be called the romantic use of the word,
with a high focus on feelings:
the love which observers are likely to call infatuation.
There is no shortage of this sense on display in films,
drama, books, songs, and indeed in everyday lives.
For our reflection, we should treat this as a secondary sense
and leave to one side.
A better starting point is what we would call ‘love’ in families,
between husbands and wives,
between parents and children,
love that denotes commitment, concern, support and service,
love that is mostly shown in everyday, ordinary ways.
Commitment and concern are also marks of close friendships,
In English it isn’t very usual to use the word ‘love’
for the relationship between close friends,
but that shouldn’t stop us making the connection.
Deep friendship combines affection and love.
So let us interpret ‘love’ as the underlying reality
in close bonds in families and between friends.
We are used to the idea that God speaks to us through his Word.
We are people who take the scriptures seriously,
people who believe that these words
from 2000 and more years ago
contain a message of life for everyone –
and that they are to speak to us
both directly and through the community of faith.
But that is not the only way God speaks to us.
I encourage you, in response to today’s readings,
to reflect on your own experiences,
throughout your life so far,
of love and friendship, both giving and receiving.
These experiences do much more than just provide us with the vocabulary to appreciate the scripture.
They are holy places.
For John said something really remarkable:
God is love.
These experiences of love,
of unselfish care and concern for another,
have within them,
in some mysterious way,
an encounter with God.
In them, God touches our spirit and we know something of Him.
This is our Gospel: that God is love.
We are people chosen – commissioned –
to share this truth about God.
To do this, we have to be authentic:
we have to be people who witness to this truth with our lives.
We have to love one another.
Just as Jesus calls us friends,
so we are to be true friends of one another.
Our relationship with our fellow believers
is not to be casual, nor just superficially friendly.
We are to show true love and true friendship.
We are to live out what we believe
– that God is love.