GOD IS LOVE
If one had to choose a three-word quotation from the Bible to summarize the whole meaning of our faith, to represent all that our Christian faith must tell the world, I would probably choose the three words we hear this Sunday: “God is love”. This statement is like the high point in the whole Bible. The long way of the sacred history that starts with Israel and continues with the Church, ends with these words which are the beginning and the end at the same time.
These three words are the answer to a lot of questions we make ourselves throughout our lives. These three words also are the answer to many questions other people ask us.
Why are we in the world? Because God is love and because God created us out of love. “God who created man out of love also calls him to love the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being. For man is created in the image and likeness of God who is himself love” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1604). Why do we believe in Jesus, our Lord and our Saviour? It is because God is love and He has sent his Son, his own Son, not to condemn us but to save us. However, why does the Bible tell us that God many times gets angry? It is because God is love, and it´s a passionate and jealous love for us. God is actually very interested in us; God is worried about us. As every father and mother, God suffers when we do things wrong.
However, why does God, so many times, look distant and even God seems to be absent? Why can’t we “see” God? It is because God is love and he loves us as responsible and free people. God knows that if we “saw” him, if we had the immediate experience of his presence, we would not be free anymore, we would not be ourselves. We need to freely choose love to be able to see God.
But why is there so much suffering in the world? The answer continues being the same: because God is love and he has created us out of his love to love. But love is a free decision, many times we do not love and, therefore, we make others suffer.
But with regards to this last point, I would like to go further: one of the clearest signs of true love is to wish to suffer for the other person. A mother, a father, when they see their son or daughter suffering because of a disease, or whatever, they would like to suffer in their own son or daughter’s place. They would like to take that suffering for themselves.
Well, that is the point to which God’s love for us reaches, because God is love, God Father in his own Son, has wanted to take our sufferings and the origin of most of our sufferings, that is to say, sin. God has wanted to take it for himself because God is love.
Thus, we understand better what Jesus teaches in this Sunday Gospel: “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you, abide in my love. This is my commandment: that you love one another as I have loved you.” The same love of the Father, the same love Jesus receives from his Father, that is the love with which Jesus has loved us. That love, capable of reaching to the cross because of his love for us, that love is the one Jesus asks us to live.
But that love is only possible to the extent to which we accept and live another beautiful quotation we have heard today. Jesus says: “You are my friends if you do what I command you. I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.”
Jesus’ friendship, what else can we ask for?
This time of pandemic has been and still is a time in which solitude has threatened us. Solitude, that risk to which we are all exposed. Jesus offers his friendship to us: “It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you.” Jesus wants to be our friend and for that reason, Christians who accept Jesus’ friendship, will never ever be alone.
God is love; St. John says to us. You are my friends; Jesus says to us. May these wonderful words be engraved in our hearts and help us to live with hope the week that begins.
Fr. Juan Carlos
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