“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.”
Let’s start with a reminder of the three Greek words than can mean “love” in English. There’s eros—which is the love of desire, of attraction, of romance. There’s philia, which is the love of friendship, of mutual happiness. And then there’s agape, which is classically understood as a gift of self to the other—not out of self-interest, but out of free will.
This classic distinction, which has influenced Christian theology in all sorts of ways, makes a big deal about the difference between what is simply natural—that is, those basic attractions of body and personality and emotion that lead to either romance or happy friendship—and that which is more distinctively human, which is to say rational—the love that is a matter of free will, when we pledge ourselves to another in an unconditional way.
So it’s important here to remember that when we say that God is love, the Apostle is not saying that God is simply a feeling, an emotional response—or even a matter of mutual affection. When we say that God is love, it means precisely that God is a communion of self-giving, that even apart from creation and time, he is, in the eternal Trinity, a perfect and ongoing act of sharing and reception, of gift and response. To say that God is love is to say that God is Trinity—the fullness of gift, of reciprocal love, and of mutual delight.
This is all very abstract, I know. What does it mean to “abide in love”?
First, it has to mean, on a basic and literal level, that we stay in fellowship with the Son. In other words, we cannot claim that we abide in love when we do not maintain definite eucharistic fellowship with the Catholic Church, the visible body of Christ.
Second, it means a personal commitment to the same kind of self-giving and patience that we see in the life of Jesus.
In a way, we see that most clearly in the life of St. Matthias. He’s mentioned briefly in our reading from Acts. We don’t know much about him, other than that he was there, and he was faithful. Really, that’s all we need to know—which is a reminder that the Christian life is not fundamentally about being special, or doing exciting things, but about passing on the good gifts that we have received.
Likewise, it does mean exhibiting the patience and gentleness of Christ.
Look, I don’t want to say that Christianity is just being nice. I did my first seminary work at a Methodist institution, and the joke was always that Methodists are “God’s nice people.” Mainline liberal Protestantism has made an idol out of niceness—as if Christianity had no message of its own but were simply the neutral vehicle for affirming whatever else is out there. But that kind of niceness is a sort of distortion of the real Christian stance. To be gentle and kind, if it is the way that Jesus is gentle and kind, isn’t easy. We aren’t nice for the sake of keeping the peace with evil; we are nice because sometimes we realize that there is nothing true that we can say, that silence is the right witness, that we ourselves are not the lords of history.
When it comes to contemporary issues, whether in the Church or in civil society, we need to remember that, as we say in the Creed, the risen Christ will come again to judge both the quick and the dead. In other words, we are not the judges of history. God is. Our job is before all else to abide in the love of God. It seems that increasingly many people in the modern West conflate goodness with a certain judgmental spirit about whether or not they are on the correct side of history. On the left, it’s a totalitarian ideology masquerading as kindness; on the far right, it can be cruelty masquerading as faithfulness. And for Christians, especially Catholics, to fall into either of these camps is to show the world that we are unbelievers.
“They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.” When Jesus says this, he doesn’t mean that he’s not human, or that we aren’t. The point is that we are not just of this world; our citizenship is in heaven. This is ultimately the source of the oneness that Jesus asks the Father to give us.
In today’s divisive culture, to take a stand for oneness may look like a kind of martyrdom; even to be polite to one another can strike the culture warriors of right and left as a betrayal, because they want us to see the world as nothing but a battle that must be won or lost. But goodness incarnate didn’t save the world by conquest—at least not of earthly things. He saved it by death. And if we want to follow him to heaven, where he has ascended, we must find the courage to give up our need to control destiny. Notice that I don’t say we give up attempting to do good or witness to the truth—but our success isn’t determined by what the Supreme Court thinks or whether we can win a popularity contest. Our success is determined by how faithfully we remain in the love of Christ.
In the Ordinariate, we often talk about the culture of Anglican parochial life that many of us brought into the Catholic Church. It is very much a culture of propriety and good taste and gentleness, whether that’s in the subtlety of our aesthetics or the sense that coffee hour is an essential extension of Sunday Mass. These things can be distorted, of course. But they can also be a great gift, because they help us learn to be members of a body whose integrity and health and love are themselves essential for our witness to a broken and sinful world. Lord help us to be that body, and to find our good in its good, so that we all may be one, as you and the Father are one. Amen.