Wednesday after Epiphany
St John was a lover! And he calls us to be lovers, too – lovers of God, of self, and of all other people. John writes of love more than any other biblical writer. The word love occurs 27 times in today’s letter, 7 times in his second and third letters combined, and 39 times in his Gospel. Love. Love. Love. That’s the essence of the Gospel message and the basis of our life in Christ. God is Love, and in God we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). There is no life of faith apart from love. Too often we make it harder than it has to be, and we make our discipleship about rigid rules and expectations rather than about love. Our Christian faith truly is this simple: love God, love self, love neighbor; nothing more, nothing less. St John guides us in living lives of love.
If God so loved us, we also must love one another. The more we recognize our own belovedness, the greater our motivation to love others. Do you know, really know how unconditionally God loves you? Part of my lifelong struggle until recently has been knowing the love of God intellectually but not fully knowing it in my heart and soul. My spiritual director has been a huge source of help and encouragement to me in the past couple years, and I’ve experienced great breakthrough in knowing God’s love. Perhaps my story resonates with you. God loves each of us fully, equally, and without condition. No one is left out. You don’t need to earn it. If God so loved us, we also must love one another. Notice the imperative. We must love one another. How can we receive God’s love for ourselves and hoard it? We can’t. Our call is to love others without exception, because that’s how God loves. I can’t come before God and say, “I love these people, but I don’t love him and it’s impossible to love her, and I really can’t stand that group of people . . .” God says, I love them all, please love them with me.
How do we live this life of love? For some of us, it’s hard to believe that we are truly loved just as we are. For most all of us, we have people in our lives who are hard to love; we may even harbor longtime prejudices against certain groups of people. St John writes, if we love one another, God remains in us, and his love is brought to perfection in us. The word perfection, as it’s used here, means completion. God’s love is made complete, whole, full when we love everyone without exception. God has not given us an impossible task! Let us today call upon the Holy Spirit and ask God to help us to love, to bring God’s love a little more to completion in us. When we think, talk, and act like Jesus, we will bring God’s love to perfection because Jesus does nothing apart from Love.
Because the Gospel and our life in Christ can be boiled down to love, I ask myself this question when evaluating situations in my life and making decisions, what is the loving response? What is the loving response to this person, to this challenge, to this obstacle, to this conflict, to this discussion, to this decision? Sometimes we wrongly evaluate life’s events according to standards of black and white and of perceived rules. At times, we think we are behaving lovingly toward others, while in reality we put an obstacle between them and Love by imposing rules or rigid expectations and instilling fear. St John assures us, There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment, and so one who fears is not yet perfect in love. Perfect love drives out fear! Let us today examine our hearts and minds and ask the Spirit to show us our own fear. May we then ask Perfect Love itself to drive out our fear and bring us to greater receptivity to Love.
Finally, because God is love, we need not fear eternal punishment nor question our salvation. John declares, God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him. In this is love brought to perfection among us, that we have confidence on the day of judgment because as he is, so are we in this world. John also makes clear, Whoever acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God remains in him and he in God. We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us. Later in this first letter, John proclaims, I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life (1 John 5:13). We can go back to the oft-quoted John 3:16 for icing on the cake: For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. John wants us to be confident – confident in God’s love for us, confident in our ability to love others with God’s help, confident in our salvation because of Christ’s saving work and loving presence. So throughout today, let us be joyful and confident in God’s love for us and ask ourselves, what is the loving response? to each person and situation. M
Elizabeth Wourms