15th Sun after Pent. Matt.22:35-46; Love of God

God is love. Everything to do with God is love. Today we hear Christ distill all the commandments into two great commandments. “Love your God with all your heart, soul and mind,” and “love your neighbour as yourself.” The Pharisee’s had not just the well known 10 commandments, but 6oo plus more. Christ is telling the lawyer here that all their commandments including dietary laws, tithing laws, behaviour and uncleanliness laws etc. were useless if not preceded by and enveloped in love. This is the theme throughout all the New Testament; God’s love for us and our loving response back to God as revealed in our loving response to our fellow brothers and sisters of the race of Adam. For as John the Theologian says (1 John 4:20) “He who says I love God and hates his brother is a liar…”

What is love? What does it look like? One of our most quoted the bible verses is John 3:16 “For God so loved the world He gave His only begotten Son…” So we see love is giving, not taking. God demonstrates His love to us by giving us His Son. As the children’s song goes “Love is only something if you give it away…and then you end up getting more.” We hear in the famous “love” description St. Paul gives the Corinthian church in (1 Cor. 13), slightly paraphrased; “Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, have the gift of prophecy, understand all mysteries and all knowledge, have faith so as to remove mountains, give all my goods to feed the poor, give my body to be burned, but have no love, it profits me nothing.” So, we see it has nothing to do with our wonderful talents and they mean nothing if not preceded with and enveloped in love. We then hear how love acts, “love suffers long and is kind, does not envy, parade itself, is not proud, rude, seek its own good, is not provoked to anger or defensiveness, thinks no evil, hates iniquity and loves the truth. Love bears, believes, hopes and endures all things, and never fails. When all gifts and all knowledge fail, there will always abide faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love.”

We understand so little about what is really going on. We have such limited knowledge, and yet we constantly unlovingly judge each other, determining if “they” are acting properly by our often-deluded standards, St. Maximos the confessor, in his text “Fourth Century on Love” (19,20,21,148) gives us some practical advice on the subject of love;

“Do not neglect the commandment of love; for through it you will become a son of God, but transgressing it you will become a son of Gehenna. Love between friends is destroyed if you envy or are the object of envy; if you cause or suffer loss; if you revile or suffer revilement; and finally, if you feed and keep suspicious thoughts against your brother…Do not be conquered by hatred but conquer it by love…. Pray God sincerely about him, accept his excuses or cure yourself by excusing him, regard yourself as the cause of the trial and resolve to endure until the cloud has passed. Pay heed to yourself lest it be in you and not in your brother that lurks the evil that cuts you off from him; and hasten to make your peace with him, lest you forsake the commandment of love. Fear keeps the old commandments, but that love keeps the life-giving commandments of Christ.”

We have the first great commandment to love God above all else, because without this first in place, our hearts remain hard and selfish and we can not fulfill the second great commandment; to love our neighbor as ourselves. We seek to grow in our love for God by spending time with Him, allowing Him to come and touch our hearts and soften them. Love is always demonstrated by the time we carve out to spend with the object of our love. Taking the time to come to as many Church services as we can, especially the Divine Liturgies and feast days, where the very body and blood of Christ unites and transforms us, we are slowly but ever increasing united with Christ. By deliberately spending time alone in prayer, not just in one-way communication, not just saying our prayers and asking for Divine intervention for our family and friends and life circumstances – important as this is – but by stopping and just quietly standing before God, allowing His ever-present Spirit to reveal Himself to us, and reveal ourselves to us, that at the heart level we may encounter Him in Spirit and truth and our stony hearts may begin to be softened.

 

If we are to fulfill the first commandment, even in our poor and pathetic human ways, we will need to take time to get alone before God and pray. This takes deliberate planning, as there is nothing the evil one will try harder to keep us from. If we are waiting for the mood to be right and our schedules clear, we can be sure we will always have many very honourable distractions placed before us, and our “laters” will be ongoing until we do finally manage to come face to face with our God – at our death. So, beginning with fierce determination and forethought – for remember; (Matt.11:12) “the kingdom of God is taken by force,”- we stand regularly before our icons in prayer. We should not expect to encounter God in an ongoing relationship until we have at least taken the time to allow Him to break through our busyness and our slackness by standing regularly in silence before Him.

But then we often find He seems somehow still absent. “I’m here now God, I’ve carved out this time from my busy life so where are You?” It’s good then to remember that this is a mutual relationship we are cultivating. God is of course there, He is everywhere present and filling all things and if He wasn’t right there with us, we would cease to exist. He has also been with us for the other 23 ½ hours of the day when we haven’t had any time for Him so if this is a mutual relationship, we may have to wait a little for Him to reveal Himself to our conscious awareness. Remember He has been waiting the rest of the time for us to show up as well!

He will reveal Himself to our awareness in as much as we are able to bear Him, and with most of us that is in a very small dose. But even this is glorious! His coming in this way will bring complete truth and honesty and if we are not fully aware of just how far we have fallen, this sudden revealing may be hard to handle. Remember He said to His faithful servant Moses that no man may see His face and live. He knows our capacity and situation in truth and love far better than we, and so He is greatly gentle and loving and usually doesn’t suddenly reveal His light of illumination to us. If we saw too much of our true selves at once we might end up in despair at the local psych. ward. May we slowly start to see and judge ourselves, that we may come to Him in repentance for forgiveness and healing, rather than be struck by a blow of sudden condemnation. As God loves us in this gentle manner, we should also imitate this practice with loving our brothers and sisters and be very careful how we judge their obvious faults, both in our thoughts, as our thoughts are broadcast on a band that does affect them and negative thoughts are in fact the polar opposite of praying for them and closer to cursing them. Especially we should not be sharing our uninvited “insights” as to how they can be better people in truth and love, as the truth without love is often a weapon of the enemy. We should usually avoid trying to “correct” others as most of us are woefully deluded in thinking we know how to love either God or our neighbours. If we have a sudden need to really straighten out a sinner, we should quickly find the closest mirror and let loose!

 

We often have an image in our mind about who God is and how we and those we know must act, to be worthy of His love. We are never worthy of His love, it is completely a gift to us and we can do nothing to increase or earn it. God loves us and all of mankind. Full stop! We close every Liturgy with this pronouncement. “For He is a good God Who loves us and all of mankind.” His love doesn’t somehow change if we are behaving badly. He loves all of those who have never entered the doors of any church as much as He loves any of us – His children sheltered safely under His wings. He knows we are causing ourselves great unneeded grief and pain and confusion when we wilfully choose to ignore the advice of the scriptures and the saints, when we don’t seek Him with all our heart, soul and mind, but He loves us throughout all our folly. His heart breaks with compassion as He waits for us to come to our senses and simply come to Him in humility and thanksgiving, in weakness and in longing to be united with Him. Christ came to heal the broken-hearted, to give liberty to the captives and comfort all who mourn – not to heap judgement and condemnation upon us. He waits patiently for each of us to choose to turn to Him, taking the time to stop everything and seek Him in prayer. He is never absent, but always knocking at the door of our hearts, awaiting our response to His love. Waiting to bless and forgive us and wrap us in His loving arms. The question is never “Does God love us?” but rather “How am I responding to His ever-present love?” How am I demonstrating His love in loving my neighbors? What is your answer, and mine?

With the Feast!