What Kind of Love Is This?
Reflections on 1 John 4.7-21
RCL Easter 5B
29 April 2018
Saint Faith’s Anglican Church
Vancouver BC
1 John 4.7-21[1]
4.7Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. 9God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. 10In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. 12No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.
13By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. 14And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Saviour of the world. 15God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. 16So we have known and believe the love that God has for us.
God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. 17Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgement, because as he is, so are we in this world. 18There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. 19We love because he first loved us. 20Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. 21The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.
What Kind of Love Is This?
One of the challenges that any teacher of ancient and modern languages faces is that of nuance. For example, let’s take the situation of someone reporting that they are ill. In English I can state that fact that Jack is ill if I have seen him or talked to him or received a note from a physician. But what if I haven’t seen Jack or talked to him or received a note from a physician? Well, if I’m told that Jack is sick by someone reliable, I might say that Jack is apparently ill or that I’ve been told that he’s ill. But if I really doubt that Jack is ill because I think he’s taking time away to watch the hockey play-offs, I might roll my eyes, lift my eyebrows and say, ‘Well, Jack’s sick(wink, wink, nudge, nudge).’
The German language is a bit more precise and actually changes the verb: Jack ist krank(fact). Jack sei krank (probability). Jack wäre krank(doubt).
We run into this challenge whenever we read or hear the New Testament in English translation. What contemporary North American English tends to express through gesture and inflection, New Testament Greek expresses through precise words in a variety of forms. Perhaps there is no more challenging concept to translate from New Testament Greek into contemporary English than ‘love’. Whenever I hear someone use the word ‘love’, I am often tempted to probe what they actually mean. What kind of love are they talking about?
Possession as Love
Sometimes people say that they ‘love’ something when what they really mean is that they enjoy possessing what they are speaking about. They may ‘love’ their car or ‘love’ their house or even ‘love’ their personal appearance. It’s love as a one-way street: my car doesn’t love me nor my house nor my appearance. It is the pleasure of possession that has captured me.
But love as the pleasure of possessing something is not the love the writer of 1 John is describing. What we possess, we can lose. The fear of losing our possessions can lead us into a defensive shell; we can become ‘hoarders’ who have no idea what we own and only take pleasure in possessing. It is not a step on the way towards the love the writer of 1 John encourages us to express.
Obligation as Love
Sometimes people say that they ‘love’ something or someone because they have an obligation to that object or person. I remember when Owen was quite young. There was a children’s television programme that was something like the Flintstones only with dinosaurs. The youngest in the family, an annoying, self-centred and more than mischievous creature, was regularly heard to say, ‘I’m the baby; you gotta love me!’ Every once and a while Owen would smile at his parents and older siblings and then chime, ‘I’m the baby; you gotta love me!’
The decision to have children brings the obligation to care for them, to nurture them, to do all that is possible to ensure their future. It’s not always fun and the frustrations are many. But our love for our children or our nieces and nephews or our grandchildren or children for whom we have some responsibility is coloured partly by our obligation, our duty of care.
But love as obligation is not the kind of love the writer of 1 John is describing. Love as obligation can lead to anger, to the feeling of being trapped, to the fear of being irresponsible. I have known parents who cannot accept that their adult children are responsible for their own choices, as painful as such acceptance is. Somewhere deep inside the parent hears the voice, ‘I’m the baby; you gotta love me!’ and guilt plants its roots firmly in the soul.
Obligation can be a step on the path towards the kind of love the writer of 1 John wants us to experience. Because God loves us, perhaps we have some obligation in return. But God desires more.
Affection as Love
Sometimes when we say that we ‘love’ someone, we are describing affection, the sense of having an affinity for another person. Friendship, a vital part of healthy life, is a relationship based upon such affinity. For often mysterious reasons we are attracted to other people, even when their tastes are different from our own, even when their style of life differs considerably from our own. We share confidences in the expectation that our friends will honour our trust. We open windows into our inner selves in the expectation that only warmth and sunshine will enter.
But our affections are sometimes betrayed. Our confidences become ‘tweets’ and our inner selves are blasted by cold winds that usher in shadows. Friendship, as important a form of love as it is, is not the kind of love the writer of 1 John is describing. It is a step on the journey towards such a love; after all, in the Gospel according to John, Jesus calls his disciples ‘friends’. But it is not yet our destination.
Devotion as Love
Sometimes obligation and affection turn our love into something deeper, something more enduring, something that fear cannot undermine. It is this deeper, more enduring and more fear-resistant expression of love that the writer of 1 John urges his fellow believers, both those to whom he wrote so long ago and to us who hear these words unleashed upon us in our time and in our place. This love is the love we call devotion.
Devotion is love that commits itself to a particular way of being and that holds nothing back from the object of its devotion. Devotion, unlike possession, is a two-way street; we offer, we receive many times over from the object of our devotion. For Christians the object of our devotion is the God made known to us in the life, death and resurrection of Christ: “God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.” [2]
We can love God and others because we feel obliged; we can love God and others because we feel affection. But we only touch the love for God and for others we were created to know when we devote ourselves, our souls and bodies, our minds and strength to love as God has loved us.
What I as your priest say to you today is nothing new; we have all heard it time and time again in the words of the Scriptures, in the prayers we offer and in the words we speak to God and to one another. But in times such as ours, when some people fear that the demise of Christian communities such as ours is just over the horizon, in such times we are beckoned to renew our devotion, the self-giving love that knows that it is the giving of ourselves to God and to others that we receive life in all its fullness.
What kind of love is this? The only love we truly need, the only love we truly seek, the only love worthy of the God in whom we believe.
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