Tuesday after Epiphany, January 5, 2020

1 John 4:7-10

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God; everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God. Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love. In this way the love of God was revealed to us: God sent his only-begotten Son into the world so that we might have life through him. In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.

We must understand this passage, the First Reading for today’s Mass, in order to understand love.

“Let us love one another, because love is of God.”  The Greek noun John uses throughout this passage that is translated as “love” is αγαπη [agápe], signifies the love that exists between family members and friends.  It is derived from the verb [αγαπαω] he uses here.  This noun indicates fondness, affection, bonds, and devotion.  John says, in this verse, that this love has its origin in God.  It comes from him to us as a gift we are to share with one another.  John’s primary meaning is for the Christians to whom he is writing to love one another, but we can also understand it as love for our fellow human beings who are not Christian, just as the Good Samaritan had love for the injured Jew.  Let us also notice that John uses the same word to speak of the love that is “of God” and the love we ought to share with one another.  It is the same love.  We share the same love God has for himself in the Holy Trinity.  Our love is finite whereas God’s is infinite, but it is the same love.  It is, therefore, a holy thing.  To love one another for the sake of God is to perform a holy act.

At the same time, we must know how to love, for we are finite creatures and not able to love as the infinite God does.  To love is to will and choose the good for the other, as St. Thomas Aquinas explains most succinctly, restating 1 Corinthians 13, 4-8.  Now, for us, God has established an order of love, an order of charity.  First, we are to love the Lord our God with all our strength and mind and body and soul.  Then we are to love ourselves, maintaining ourselves and seeking the good as only we can, out of love for the God who created us.  Next in order, we love our neighbors, beginning with members of our immediate family, especially our parents, and after that our friends and then the rest of the human race, and first of all our fellow Christians.

“Everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God.”  In order to love with the love with which God loves us, we must first be baptized.  In baptism we receive the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and love.  The virtue of love we receive in baptism is distinct from the natural love that a brother has for his sister, or a daughter for her mother, or a friend for a friend.  The virtue of love we receive is of a higher order than natural love, just as the sonship we receive from God in baptism is of a higher order than the sonship we receive from our natural parents.  This is because it is a supernatural gift that is ordered to our eternal happiness.  Equipped with the sanctifying grace of baptism and the virtue of love, we can love God.  We can also know God through this love, because love, particularly the supernatural virtue of love, is a way of knowing.  True, unselfish love permits intimacy, and in this intimacy two people know each other in ways others who do not share this cannot.  Thus, “Whoever is without love does not know God.”  And this intimacy sustains the love.  The Christian can say, as no one else can, that to love God is to know him, and to know him is to love him.

“For God is love.”  God is love in that he is all-lovable and all-loving.  He is all-lovable for he is infinitely perfect in his being and in his actions.  His perfection includes his supreme beauty, his omnipotence, and his omniscience.  He is all-loving, for he loves himself in the Holy Trinity and also all that he has created, creating it as “good”, that is, pleasing to him.  His love is infinite and unconditional.  There is nothing he would not do for the one he loves if the one he loves would allow him.  God is also love itself in the personal sense, since the Holy Spirit is the very love of the Father and the Son.

“In this way the love of God was revealed to us: God sent his only-begotten Son into the world so that we might have life through him.”  In the Old Testament, God revealed his love for his Chosen People by forming them out of the twelve tribes of Israel, leading them out of the slavery of Egypt, and protecting and rescuing them from their enemies.  In the sending of his only-begotten Son, God reveals his love for the human race, for his Son offers redemption to the human race through his Death on the Cross.  This Death is both a sign of love and an act of love, for it shows that God would do anything to save us — even sacrificing his Son for us, and it makes this salvation possible.  Even during his lifetime, his Son showed the Father’s love by healing the sick, teaching us about him, and showing us how to return God’s love so that we might dwell in heaven despite the sins we have committed.

“In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.”  John tells us that we can love God because he first loved us.  Our knowledge of God’s perfection and his unconditional love ought to spur us to love him in return.  If we did not know about his love, we could admire him, but it would be hard to love him.  He shows his love to us, especially through his Son, and in our meditation on his love for us, which each of us can experience in prayer, for his love for each of us is intensely personal.  We recall how in Mark 10, 21, a young man came to the Lord Jesus and asked him, “What shall I do that I may receive life everlasting?”, and Jesus “looked on him with love”.  We also recall how John the Apostle was so aware of the Lord’s love for him that he referred to himself as “the disciple whom he loved” (cf. John 19, 26).  Besides this, John tells us that, “Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister Mary and Lazarus” (John 11, 5).  Further examples in the Scriptures of his personal love could be multiplied.

Let each of us carefully consider how God has loved us personally, gazing fixedly at the Crucifix and bringing to mind, “He did that for me.”  Let us spend time thinking and meditating on this every day, keeping in mind that he is present in our hearts as we do so, looking on us in his infinite mercy and his desire for us to love him in return.