“I just love our church” is a phrase I heard last night. It is, happily, a phrase I hear a lot in our community. Praise the Lord!
Reflecting on yesterday’s sermon, however, I find myself thinking about something Owen Barfield wrote in his excellent little introduction to Vladimir' Solovyov’s On the Meaning of Love. He notes the way in which Love is given, it arises, it dawns upon us, it grows often without our own initial action. Love is a gift. It is gratuitous. And yet, while being a gift, Love is not content to let us remain passive. Love, while at first “being given, it demands to be used.”
Love may begin as a feeling or an event or an arrangement or an accident, but it cannot remain thus. “The task of love consists in justifying in deed that meaning of love which at first is given only in feeling.” This, suggests Barfield, is the logic that finds crude expression in medieval chivalry. One cannot merely have a darling, one must fight for their honor or give them a token.
Love begins as a noun and demands to become a verb.
Nowhere is this more true than the Gospel of Jesus, “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.” (1 Jn. 3:16). Christ is not content to love us in abstraction but in truth and deed. Love drew him, as it were, into the hard reality of history, to six hours on a cross on a Friday.
This is the crux of the problem in Matthew 22: the pharisees are fine with the idea of “loving God” and “loving neighbor” but not at all with the reality of neighbor in the form of widow or samaritan or publican. They love thinking they “love God” but do not at all want that abstraction to be ruined by the Reality of Jesus the Messiah, the Son of David reigning in the Temple three days before Passover.
At All Saints Honolulu, as we grow there is this thrill, “wow, another baptism…” or “wow, what a wonderful healing service…” or “its great to be a part of all that God is doing…” and “I just love this church…”
And the trajectory of that love-of-church is precisely the cultivation of a willingness to suffer the pains and inconveniences of the beloved parish of which we find ourselves members. Growing and changing and sending-out missionaries and church-planters comes with pain and stretching and tearing. And we all become like so many small loaves in the hands of Jesus as he breaks us and gives us away.
Thus, for John in his first epistle, the Love of Jesus which was displayed in the solidity of his cross and passion becomes a model of our love: “we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers” (1 Jn. 3:16). And the promise is that of the miracle of loaves and fishes: after all the breaking we will find ourselves with baskets full (cf. Matt. 14:20).
