Love Beyond

Overwhelming, by David Sorenson

Midweek Vespers

The Fourth Week of Easter

A Reading from Luke’s Gospel:

But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.

The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

A Reflection by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945):

Jesus Christ stands between the lover and the others he or she loves. I do not know in advance what love of others means on the general idea of love that grows out of my human desires—all this may rather be hatred and an insidious kind of selfishness in the eyes of Christ. What love is, only Christ tells in his Word.

Contrary to all my own opinions and convictions, Jesus Christ will tell me what love toward my brother and sister really is. Therefore, spiritual love is bound solely to the Words of Jesus Christ. Where Christ bids me to maintain fellowship for the sake of love, I will maintain it. Where his truth enjoins me to dissolve a fellowship for my love’s sake, there I will dissolve it, despite all the protests of my self-centered love.

Because spiritual love does not desire but rather serves, it loves an enemy as a brother or sister. It originates neither in the brother or sister nor in the enemy but in Christ and his Word. Self-centered love can never understand spiritual love, for spiritual love is from above; it is something completely strange, new, and incomprehensible to all earthly love.

Life Together, as reprinted in For All the Saints.

Further Reflection:

We say that God is love, and this is most certainly true. We say furthermore that whosoever claims to love God, yet hates his brother or sister, is a liar, and this also is most certainly true. Yet to say that God is love is not to say all love is God. The loves we know, here below, are all of them reflections, echoes, of the perfect love that is God, Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit. True love pours into us from Him, fills us up to bursting, then overflows into all the world around us. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.

We speak of God analogously—which is to say that no matter what we speak of God, He will always be better, truer, and more beautiful than anything we could put into words. Yet even if God is beyond words, even if His truth is infinitely greater than anything we could fully say or know, this doesn’t mean that words are meaningless.

Some say that God is good, yet believe He does horrible things. How then, we may ask, can you say that God is good when you seem to think Him so very terrible? Well, they reply, it’s because the goodness of God is beyond human understanding. Fair enough. But if what you call God’s goodness is a horror here below, then our words lose all their meaning. Freedom is slavery; lies are truth; war is peace. A terrible doublethink.

When we say God is good, what we mean is that no matter how good we think goodness is, God is better, because God is Goodness itself, Goodness with a capital G. And everything truly good in our lives is but an echo and reflection of the God who is all Goodness. And so it is unthinkable that God could be evil, that God would do evil. Divine mystery is fine for holy contemplation, but never as a cover for some horror.

God cannot do evil, because God is good. Period. And if we imagine that God indeed does evil—even if we call it a mysterious kind of good—then we are wrong. And we are speaking of something, by definition, that cannot be the true God. It’s the same with love.

When we say that God is love, we confess that God is Love itself, Love poured out between Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit in the deep mystery of the Trinity, who is One and who is Three. And all the loves we know here below—affection, friendship, romance—they’re all reflections of the deepest love of all: ἀγάπη, caritas, spiritual love: a love which is not a feeling but an act of will, a choice, to put the good of another before our own: to pour ourselves out, to give of ourselves, in an act of creation, for the one we love.

That’s who God is. That’s what God does. Love like this is not a feeling, not a sentiment, not simply being nice. It burns like fire and truth and the rays of the sun. It drives us to action, it brings us to bleed, it kills us and makes us alive once again! The love of God is so fierce and so good and so strong and so true that it goes beyond any other love that we could ever have known. It is beyond words. But it is never selfish, and never unloving.

This is who God is for us, and who we must be for the world: namely, Jesus Christ.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.