Love: How God is Truly Known

LOVE: HOW GOD IS TRULY KNOWN (May 13, 2001)

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.” John 13:34

Whenever love is talked about in our society we think of romance. But there are many other types of love – the love between parents and children, the love between friends, the love of neighbor, the love of country or the love of books, the love of nature and the love of ideas.

If nothing else, Mother’s Day gives us a chance to recapture the word love as something different from the love of countless magazine and TV shows and movies which inundate our lives. That was Anna Jarvis’ original idea. She was the founder of Mother’s Day. A devout Methodist, she wished to honor her mother but came to detest the way her simple gesture which she worked so hard for was taken over by the greeting card people, the florists, and the telephone company –Ma Bell, the “mother” she didn’t wish to honor.

What she wanted was for people to say a prayer or take their mother to church or write a poem to their mother. The poor woman spent her last years blind and destitute in a sanatorium swamped by the mass-produced Mother’s Day card she abhorred.

Christians confess that God is three-in-one, the Trinity. There is no other way of defining the Christian understanding of God. More and more Christians scholars are recovering a classic definition of the Trinity which sees the Trinity as relationship – the Father Creator, Jesus Christ the Redeemer, and the Holy Spirit, the sustainer and comforter.

Like the Christian idea of God, we are who we are in our relationships. We are formed in our relationships. It is not that we have relationships. That is the way of the modern world which sees individuals as totally autonomous beings each having relationships but still independent. But the true way is to see that we are who we are in our relationships, and we are not who we are apart from our relationships, and this is why love, which binds relationships and just doesn’t dictate “having” a relationship, this is why love is the truest way into knowing the full character of God.

It is a truism: we learn best by examples. Love is the path by which God is truly known because love – the kind of love Christianity talks about -- itself is known by example.

The great example of God’s love is Jesus Christ himself, who died for us. But this example is not out there in the blue all by itself. Many people first learn of the love of God in Jesus Christ by learning of love itself within their own families. Thus, the love of a parent for a child is the classic statement of what the teachers of the Church called a preparation for the gospel. The great beauty of the gospel is that its basic sense – of God entering the world and participating in it fully himself through his own Son Jesus Christ who gave himself for us – the basic sense of this is prepared, if you will, by the many ways in which we see may see love first in our own homes, then in friends, then in the gathered community. When a parent participates in the life of his or her child this is the most natural preparation for the truth that God has fully entered our lives and participated in them, sharing our human lot, in Jesus Christ.

One of the best examples for Mother’s Day is Susanna Wesley. In the 18th century a remarkable movement began in England under John and Charles Wesley called Methodism. Its hallmark was the message of love in the Gospel. John Wesley preached faith and forgiveness and the regeneration of the heart, and he also preached spiritual discipline and moral purity.

In the Wesleyan movement the poor found a new dignity before God. They found fellowship and love and leadership opportunities. And Wesley preached that God’s love had implications for society. He strongly opposed the slave trade and he preached charity. Wesley had a conversion experience in which his heart “was strangely warmed”, but behind both Wesleys and making it all possible was their mother, Susanna, who bore 19 children (only 10 of whom lived past infancy), who embodied the love of God, and whose influence was thus incalculable.

Scholars say England avoided the radicalism of the French revolution because of the Methodist movement. It all goes back to the influence and example of Susanna Wesley. Her husband was an Anglican priest but he couldn’t manage his affairs, he couldn’t keep track of bills, and he was often thrown in debtors prison. Susanna held the family together.

It was almost inevitable that when John Wesley had his conversion experience he would see that the truth is that God is love.

Last night channel 13 showed the movie “Grapes of Wrath”, starring Henry Fonda, based on John Steinbeck’s classic book. The hero of the story is not the part played by Henry Fonda but really Ma Joad, who through all the family’s struggles holds the family together and loves to the end. They lost their land in Oklahoma not only to the dust bowl but also to greedy bankers. They traveled to California living in prison-like camps with armed guards and working for pitiful wages, attacked by mobs, burying their dead old people by the side of the road. Through all this it is Ma Joad who holds the family together.

All the struggles seemed to get at her husband. “He’s not the head of the family any more,” she says sadly at one point. And in the final scene he says, “we couldn’t have made it without you, Ma.” Behind her steely determination and grit is an incredible, sacrificial love. “Men live their lives in jerks,” she says. “They are jerked around by what happens to us, but women have to be steady.”

The new commandment given by Christ implies a new covenant, a covenant based not on law but on grace, on the grace of Jesus Christ himself. “Just as I loved you,” Jesus says, and that love was unto the end. Jesus gave this new commandment, we know, on the night of his betrayal, as he was preparing to be taken from them. But if they love as he has loved, sacrificially, then Jesus mode of life will be among them even in his absence. The love of Jesus living in the disciples by means of the Holy Spirit enables them to love each other as Christ loved them. And such love is a witness to the world; it is a way of proclaiming to the world the love God has for it. The love of God builds community and by this way God is truly known.

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.”