The Heart of All
A Reading from the First Epistle of St John:
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. 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.
The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Homily:
Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
The theme associated with the fourth and final candle on our Advent wreath is love. And that sounds a bit insipid, I confess. Yet love is so much more than mere sentiment. It is a metaphysical truth, a divine reality. Love is the heart of it all.
Let us imagine God, if we would, as an infinite moment of existence—not that He exists, that He comes forth out of nothing, for God does not exist in the way that we do. We borrow our existence from others: from parents, from food, ultimately from God. But God is subsistent existence itself. He is not simply some being, but Being itself. Only God, in fact, is fully, truly real. Everything else and all of us are only real, only exist, insofar as we exist in Him.
He is thus the ocean in which we swim, the womb in which we form, the mind in which we are but thoughts. God is Father, God is Creator, not in the sense that He snapped His fingers aeons ago and sat back to watch the show, but in that He creates everyone and everything in every single moment, right now. He is existence, and being, and reality. Thus if God is not real, then nothing is.
That’s what we mean when we say that God is omnipotent: not that He can square a circle or make a rock so big that He couldn’t lift it Himself; but that God is the power that makes all power possible, that makes possibility possible.
Now, in that same eternal moment that God is, God also knows. His infinite act of being is simultaneously an infinite act of knowing. This does not follow in sequence, as though first He existed and then He knew. We are outside of time here. There is neither a before nor an after. To our minds it follows logically that first you have be, in order then to be able to know. But in God it’s all one.
Of course, God does not know in the way that we know. He neither possesses nor loses His knowledge. Rather, He is knowledge itself, wisdom and truth and awareness itself. Everything there is to know, God knows, because He knows Himself. This is what we mean when we call God the Logos or the Word: not that He knows logic, but that He is logic, and that all things come into being through Him, through His knowing, through His wisdom. God does not possess reason; God is reason.
When we call God the Son of the Father, this is what we mean: that His knowledge is born of His being, and that it is every bit as infinite as His being. In fact, they saturate one another. There is no consciousness without existence, and there is nothing in existence which cannot be known. Thus the Father eternally begets the Son. Both are God, because both are One. God is and God knows. Omnipotence is omniscience.
Think of it like this: each one of us has within ourselves a self-image, a little mirror by which we seek to know who and what we are, both within and so without. With our obvious limitations, our sins and our pride, we have warped self-images, even multiple self-images, often in conflict with one another and with reality. Yet for God the Image is perfect. There is no lack, no limitation, no flaw. The Image of God is God. The God within God is also God. Savvy? Good.
Now step three. In that same eternal moment, beyond all time and space, in which God is and God knows, God also loves. He knows Himself perfectly, infinitely, and loves Himself perfectly, infinitely. And this is not some saccharine sentiment. This isn’t God thinking, “Oh, aren’t I swell?” No. Say it with me: love is not an emotion. Love is not the same thing as feeling in love. Rather, love is the act of putting the good of another, the good of the beloved, even before your own.
It is a sacrifice, a self-giving, self-outpouring. And within the eternal moment of God, this is the relationship between the Father and the Son. The Father eternally pours out His being into the Son, who is His Image and His Word. The Son, in turn, eternally pours out His knowledge into the Father, knowing all there is to know about all there is to be. And that loop of ceaseless self-outpouring, the infinite giving of infinite essence, is the love of God. And God is that love.
The love of the Son for the Father, and the love of the Father for His only begotten Son, is the Holy Spirit, who is God’s self-sacrifice, God’s self-outpouring unto God—like breath in the lungs, and blood in the veins, the circulation of life. And so in one infinite, eternal moment God is, and God knows, and God loves, without end. That is what we call the Trinity, the Three in One, the very life of God.
We who are made in His Image are not so very different. We are but pale shadows, true, pale reflections of His divinity, yet we are reflections nonetheless. We are, and we know, and we love. And these three are forever intertwined into who and what we are, into human life itself. We are consciousness, being, and bliss; goodness, truth, and beauty; because we derive, and are forever grounded, in the One who is Goodness and Beauty and Truth.
To love, then, is not an emotion, not a sentiment, not a feeling, but the very fabric of reality. Everything that we receive is gift: our body, our mind, our breath. And if we want to truly live, if we hope to become truly human and thereby be divine, then we too must pour out the joy of our being, the joy of discovery, into each other. We must love God with all we have and love our neighbors as ourselves.
This is the life of Christ within us, the life of His Body the Church. This is who is born to us upon a Christmas Day, and born again in our hearts all the year through. We are created and known and loved eternally—and as deep calls to deep, so the very life within us calls us to create and to know and love without limit, drawing us into the Trinity, into the life of our God.
Only then are we truly human. Only then are we truly saved.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
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