I John 5:1-6
John 15:9-17
A key theme of today’s readings is love. For those of us old enough to remember, the songs of the 1960s and 70s presented love as the solution to all the world’s problems. The Beatles gave us one of the anthems of that era when they sang, “All you need is love.” A bit naively idealistic, perhaps, but few of us would dispute the supreme importance of love for human life and happiness.
A curious feature of today’s readings, however, is that they present love as a matter of keeping commandments. Our Lord says in today’s Gospel: “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, as I have kept the Father’s commandments, and abide in his love.” A bit further on, he continues: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” Saint John, in the Epistle, writes: “we know that we love the children of God when we love God and keep his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments.”
Here we have a clue that by the term love the New Testament means something different from what contemporary culture understands. We tend not to think of love as something that can be summoned up at will in response to a command.
When I prepare couples for marriage, I point out that nowhere does the Prayer Book service ask whether they’re “in love” with each other. I always enjoy watching their reaction. The precise wording of the question is “Will you love him / her?” In the exchange of vows that follows, the couple promises to do just that: to love each other until parted by death. The kind of love implied by that question is not so much an emotion as a decision—although it certainly can encompass and build upon romantic feelings and physical attraction as well. And these vows are humanly impossible to fulfill without divine assistance, which is precisely why the couple comes to church seeking God’s blessing.
In his classic work published in 1960, The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis analyzed four principal Greek words for love: storgē, philia, eros, and agapē; usually translated as affection, friendship, romantic love, and charity.
Storgē—or affection—is our love for family members and others with whom we share a deep natural affinity. I love my mother, my brother, my sons, and my extended family members in the first instance simply because of the family ties themselves. They don’t have to do anything to earn that love; but when they’re likeable people, so much the better.
Philia—or friendship—is the bond that grows with someone we like based on shared interests, common experiences, and mutual understanding. Notice that this second type of love may or may not be built on the first: we can become close friends with the members of our family or, conversely, with those who begin as total strangers.
By eros, Lewis means something slightly different from the popular conception of the term as unbridled lust, which is not love at all. Rather, he means that overwhelming attraction to another person which combines romantic feelings with physical desire. It’s what we typically mean when we say that we’re “in love” with someone.
Now, the important point to get clear before we go any further is that Lewis, with the Christian tradition behind him, regards all three loves just described as perfectly natural and good. There’s nothing intrinsically evil or shameful about any of them.
Like all natural goods, however, these three loves can become distorted and disordered. They each combine what Lewis calls “need-love” and “gift-love.” That is, they fulfill our own needs, and they afford us the opportunity to help fulfill the needs of others. With each of them, selfishness and self-centeredness can overwhelm generosity, or, conversely, extreme generosity can become controlling and smothering. Still, in and of themselves, storgē, philia, and eros are naturally good – the building blocks of human happiness in fulfillment of our nature as social creatures made for life in community.
Lewis believed that these three natural loves inevitably do become corrupted unless they’re purified and completed by a fourth type of love, which he calls by the New Testament Greek word agapē, in Latin caritas, in English “charity” (although the English word has taken on other connotations). This fourth type of love is not natural but supernatural: not human but divine. It is unconditional. It persists through changing circumstances because it doesn’t depend on the fulfillment of our own needs.
Our Lord is talking about this type of love when he says, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Abide in my love.” Then, to make his meaning clear, he explains: “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Such divine love is totally self-giving and completely self-sacrificial.
The classical Christian definition of love is willing and doing the good of the other, no matter what the cost to oneself. Such love is the very antithesis of selfishness and self-centeredness. It ultimately entails dying to self, taking up the cross, and following Jesus. In Lewis’s terms, agapē or caritas is pure “gift-love.”
Thus defined, agapē is not a virtue that we can achieve ourselves by unaided human effort. It can only be received as a gift from God. So, why does Our Lord present it as a command, as if it were something that we could summon up by our own willpower? The best answer comes from Saint Augustine of Hippo, who in the late fourth century wrestled with this question in his Confessions; and ended up praying, “Command what you will, O Lord, and give what you command.”
Today’s first reading from the Acts of the Apostles describes Peter’s baptism of the household of Cornelius the Centurion, the first recorded instance of the incorporation of Gentiles into the apostolic Church. Its depiction of the Holy Spirit descending upon the newly baptized in a replay of Pentecost reminds us that at our baptism we also received the Holy Spirit. As Saint Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.”
Again, in today’s Epistle, Saint John alludes to both Baptism and the Eucharist in that wonderfully mysterious saying, “This is he who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood.”
The tie-in is that our ability to love God and one another as God has loved us comes first in Holy Baptism and then in the Holy Eucharist. Indeed, liturgical scholars believe that the Mass of the earliest Christians was originally celebrated in the context of a common meal known as the agapē, or “love feast.”
Today, then, we pray God to stir up in our hearts the gifts of the Holy Spirit given to us in Baptism and renewed in us every time we receive Holy Communion. In this way we have the capability to become a people who love God and one another with the same unconditional agapē love with which God has loved us and loves us still.
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