Article
- Date:
- Sunday 22nd May 2022
- Place:
- St George's, West Grinstead
- Service:
- Evensong
- Readings:
- Acts 16.9-15
John 14.23-29
Our Reading from acts describes the entry of Christianity into Europe, so depending on when you think these events took place - probably some time in the late 30s or early 40s CE - we should be getting ready to celebrate two thousand years of Christianity on our Continent, a grand occasion for a celebration, if only to tell ourselves that in spite of everything we have survived; that in spite of the terrible damage Christianity has done to itself through war and schism, through sterile theological controversy, through massive energy wasted on trivia, and through the brutal and frequently abusive exercise of power by a rigidly hierarchical clergy, we are still here Lord, we are still here.
But what exactly are we here for? Well, in our Reading from the Gospel of St. John Jesus tells his Disciples that they are to "love one another" as he loved them, which in turn means that we are to love one another as Jesus loves us.
I asked the question "what exactly" so I am going to attempt to answer the question exactly, precisely, in painfully specific terms.
As a social phenomenon, there is no sphere in which Western Europe has changed more rapidly in the last 250 years, including technological advancement, than in its understanding of the concept of love. Until the Italian 'high' Renaissance of the 13th Century, there were two, totally separate, kinds of love, there was the pure, Christian love of God and neighbour, called Agape, and there was the extremely coarse, frequently involving rape, love of the Gods on Mount Olympus, called Eros. The Renaissance poets, Petrarch and Dante, then introduced an idea of totally selfless adoration by men of women, which became a sublimated - we would now call it Platonic - love which was, thankfully, brought down to earth just a little by Racine in France and, more notably, by Shakespeare in England; you only have to think about Romeo and Juliet to see the point for although the language of the play is deeply uplifting and raises the quality of their love to a cosmic degree in its frequently heightened language, still, there's an earthiness about the attraction which is celebrated before the disaster that befalls them. But what has happened in the last two centuries and a half is that, beginning with the novel, love between ordinary men and women has become a matter of deep investigation and graphic description; I would argue, for example, that George Eliot knew a lot more about love than Sigmund Freud. So all of us have been brought up in an environment where we are conscious of the way our society understands romantic love, where we carry with us a notion of a devotion to the beloved which may involve sacrifice and which at least involves constant care and faithfulness; we may be an unfaithful society but, yet, we still know - well, most of us - when we have been unfaithful.
I have made this long introduction because it's important to understand ourselves: our love is, on the surface at least, deeply selfless, but acted out we know that it's largely contractual; our friendships, let alone our love affairs, do not survive for long if they are one-sided. We declare that there are limits to what we can and what we will take; and it's important to understand that this idea of mutuality marks great social progress; there are lines to be drawn, particularly by women in respect of men. But that, of course, lays open the great paradox: for no matter how human affection fades, or is destroyed, we must go on loving what we no longer like. I will come back to this.
The second, aspect of love that I want to draw attention to is that in our society love is expressed in an active way; the lover does active things to the beloved whether that is buying presents, offering stability or, obviously, expressing love in tender physical encounter.
The third aspect of our kind of love is that over time it has become increasingly internal, part of the nuclear family, part of the shift from communal living and concern to deeply individual ways of thinking; we think of the loving family as self-contained; and our politicians are always going on about "families", not about society.
so how did Jesus love his Disciples such that they were to love each other in the same ways? Well, you can characterise the love of Jesus in three ways that are directly counter to our way of loving, no matter how admirable our way of loving may be. First, the love of Jesus was and is totally uncontractual; he loved his Disciples unconditionally and, in the end, laid down his life for them; and, in turn, he loves us uncontractually and has laid down his life for us. Secondly, the love of Jesus was unconditionally social: he called for social justice and above all for unconditional forgiveness. In a way that shocks us today when we think about it, reversing our assumption of hierarchy, Jesus put community above family and family above the individual. We learn early in Acts that this involved sharing goods in common and treating everybody in the new Christian community as equal. We soon fell away from the standard Jesus set but that was, and is, the standard.
But the third respect in which Jesus loved, and loves, us is in the behaviour he demonstrated from his birth in humble surroundings to his death on a Cross; Jesus expressed love through showing his vulnerability to a world that did not repay it with tact or affection but with brutality. Nonetheless, the ultimate expression of love is not doing to others but leaving ourselves open to be done to.
So, in summary, when Jesus said that we are to love one another as he loves us, that means that we are to love one another unconditionally, regardless of contract, and that means loving people whether we like them or not; secondly, we are to love all people and to treat them equally so that social justice isn't a matter of political preference, it is an obligation of Christian love that must be honoured; and, finally, our love should not always be active, always busy, always a matter of doing stuff and saying things, it also has to be an expression of vulnerability, for that is the only way in which we are totally open to the beloved.
It's an awful lot to ask; but that's the point.