O God, the strength of all those who put their trust in thee; Mercifully accept our prayers; and because, through the weakness of our mortal nature, we can do no good thing without thee, grant us the help of thy grace, that in keeping thy commandments we may please thee, both in will and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord (Collect for the First Sunday after Trinity)
Although today’s Epistle and Gospel are about “love,” biblical love is a very serious, tough sort of love that proceeds from the Trinity, with little if anything to do with the sort of self-regarding emotion promoted by popular culture, including the music replacing hymns and psalms in so many churches. The love proclaimed in the Bible, which is God’s love first and foremost, is so powerful that the absence of it and the absence of an adequate response to it represent “the great gulf fixed” between Abraham’s bosom and hell, and these are not even the final heaven and hell, not the new permanently united heaven and earth and the final hell that will follow the General Resurrection and the Last Judgment (Luke 16:26).
We know for certain that there is no fooling around with the love of God, no taking of God for granted, because our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Prince of Love and the Prince of Peace, is the One who preaches “the great gulf fixed” that cannot be crossed after the judgment of God has been declared. It is our Lord himself who makes the ironic comment, placed in the mouth of Abraham, “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead” (Luke 16:31). Our Lord, who would die for the salvation of mankind, expressing the greatest sort of love imaginable, the Creator dying for the creature, the Innocent dying for the guilty, has no patience with demands for a “do-over” or for a private personal miracle as a condition of belief. He would rise from the dead, after all, not to deliver a new message, but to confirm and fulfill what his Father had promised, by the Holy Ghost, in the words of Moses and the Prophets.
There is only one religion in the Bible, and it is the same religion from beginning to end. There is only one hope in the Bible, and that hope lies in what God does, through his Son and by the Holy Ghost, rather than in anything at all that mankind can do for itself. Our Collect this morning, in fact, is simply a summary of the Epistle and Gospel, and it lays out the divine message contained in all of the Scriptures in three clear propositions of absolute truth.
First, God himself is the strength of all those who put their trust in him. Second, we can do no good thing without the help of God and without being the beneficiaries of the divine initiative. Third, keeping God’s commandments is not the price we pay for salvation, but the evidence of our salvation, so that we are moved by God’s love to please him in will and deed. Thus, a life without a hunger to keep the commandments, no matter how difficult or how often we fall and have to be lifted up again by grace, is a life minus the love of God; it is a life lacking a saving trust in God to do his will through us, and a life being lived on the wrong side of the great gulf fixed—a gulf that can only be crossed in this life, and not in the life of the world to come.
St. John is just as tough-minded as the Master who taught him. John declares, “We love him, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). There is no approach to God that God does not open up first, Himself. It is His love, which includes his perfect righteousness as well as His perfect mercy, that makes it possible for us to love in the only way that matters: in the way that God loves us first. God’s love is entirely aimed at our welfare, and not at any benefit or return that He might receive from loving. God can’t become more God, and God has nothing to gain from loving, as He makes terrifyingly clear by our Lord’s death on the cross. Jesus Christ has nothing to gain from dying there, not even anything to prove. He dies there for us, while we are still dead in our sins, that we might rise again with him unto the eternal life that was always his by right, from before the creation of the world.
And St. John, again by his Master’s tutelage, looks for self-less, other-directed love as the sign of salvation. He writes: “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” (1 John 4:20). There is a symmetry to the redeemed life. God loves us and reveals His love through the Scriptures and the life of His Son made man. Our faith, our hope, and our salvation are revealed by the mirror image of God’s love in our living and loving as the redeemed.
We will never enter, we cannot enter the perfect symmetry of divine love, however, as long as we cherish certain self-destructive illusions. As long as we look to the non-existent strength of our fallen human nature to give us life or to give meaning to our lives, we will still be rejecting the love that God offers. We will still be trying to cut deals with God like the hopeless and damned rich man in this morning’s Gospel.
Likewise, as long as we kid ourselves that we can do any good thing without God, as if we really didn’t need him to set us free from the bondage of our sins, as if we really could act for good without his inspiration and his constant, abiding assistance, we remain orphaned of the only power that enables us to do what is good—the love of God at work in us, and our love for God working in him: doing the loving will of our Father on earth as it is always accomplished in heaven.
St. John is not making a suggestion or giving a pep-talk when he says, “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God” (1 John 4:7). Instead, he is laying out the proof that can be had in this world, now, this minute, of our salvation. Unless we are living for others, beginning with God and ending with the most pitiful human beggar, we are not loving as God loves, and we have no proof that we are born again, from above, of God Almighty. We have no proof that we are the children of a heavenly Father, and St. John provides the “bottom-line” in reckoning the life or the absence of life of every human creature: “He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love” (1 John 4:8).
The devil is a swindler, and the father of swindlers, so he tries his best to twist and manipulate that bottom line. He tries to convince us that if we just feel “something,” that something, no matter who or what it serves, is love enough to be the demonstrable children of God. But the only passion that matters on earth or in heaven is our share in the passion of Jesus Christ. The only love that matters isn’t a feeling, because feelings can and do lie to us all the time. The love that matters is the love of our Father, who made us, knowing what it would cost to make us free, knowing the cross from before the first Word of creation, knowing that He would be betrayed again and again, and nevertheless loving us infinitely and indefatigably.
The love of the Father makes provision for us when we are at our very worst. He gives his Son to die for our sins. He gives the Holy Ghost to dwell in us, making us alive again by bringing the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the living love of our Father, into new lives bought with the blood of His Son. He gives us the commandments, the Living Word delivered by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, so that we have a vast inheritance of instruction in love to guide us, to confirm us as His own, and to make us holy, however long that process of reclamation may take. God is in no rush because He is saving and sanctifying us perfectly, and for the love of us He will take as long as He determines it will take to make us all that He has created and intended us to be.
What we pray for, then, is more love—more and more of God’s love reflected in our lives, our work, and our very being. We have been told what to do, and God the Holy Ghost is in us already to help us practice the art and discipline of divine love. Whatever our calling in life, that art and discipline of love is our purpose for being, and nothing could be a greater blessing than to draw closer day by day to the perfection of divine love in us, and it is the pursuit of that perfection, by the grace of God, that makes every day and every life well-worth living.