Fr Christopher Dillon OSB
Those words of St John in the second reading sum it all up, “God is love”. Unpacking that simple statement is not so briefly done; and I don’t pretend to be able to do it satisfactorily. Again, it is in the Gospel of John that we read the words ascribed to Jesus, when he is speaking to Philip, “to have seen me is to have seen the Father”, which gives us a hint of how the God mystery is binatarian, until with love dynamic of the Holy Spirit, it becomes trinitarian…and increasingly complicated.
So much of what we have picked up in our religious instruction, over the years, is as wrong-headed as it was well intentioned. Most of us, Christians, have the notion that God loves us and will continue to love us, on condition that we keep the rules, as laid down by the Covenant. But love is gratuitous, that is to say, freely given and unconditional; and that is what we have to take on board, in God’s regard. God loves us because he loves us; there are no ifs or buts; and it is only in response to that unconditional love that we can truly love God.
Christian revelation allows us to speculate that God the Father being God, being love, gives himself in and to the Son. The Son being God and therefore love, gives himself reciprocally to the Father. This giving back to the Father involves the whole drama of the Incarnation and the passion with all that follows from it, all of it the expression of divine love. This is what we celebrate, when we speak about the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the self-giving love of the Father to the Son and the self-giving love of the Son to the Father, which, by virtue of our individual baptism into the body of Christ, includes our efforts at self-giving love. So it is that everything which we address to the Father we do through the Son, by the strength and light of the Holy Spirit.
Let me conclude these most inadequate observations by remarking that, to the extent that we manage to exercise self giving love in our relationship with others, we are being God- like, we are being Christ to others, we are being the kindness of God in the world. In a word, we are fulfilling our calling as children of God.