May 7, 2015
These weeks will have me back in New York: first Manhattan, then Long Island and finally Buffalo. It’s wonderful to return to places you’ve been before. You want to see if you can reproduce the feelings you remember – subtle feelings, almost moods. But you also notice changes – buildings demolished, buildings put up, neighborhoods changed, children grown, different people on the streets.
For all that we love and need newness in our lives, underneath we are always looking for what endures. It’s as if keyholes were bored into us and we keep searching for the key that will open up what is deepest in our hearts. Most of all we remember the people, the ones who became closest to us, the ones who loved us the longest. In the end, these make up the continuity of our emotional and historical lives.
We cling to love that endures, even as we live in a world where love seems to vanish. It’s not only the loves that come to an end – the breakups, the divorces, the deaths. It’s the loves that become dull, buried behind our cluttered agendas, presumed but never shown, deafened by a silence that makes us distant to each other.
When God reveals love, it is saturated with endurance, as well it should be. We’ve been hearing these words: abide, dwell, remain. Because the only kind of love that has any meaning is the love that remains, the lasting commitment we make to another because the other has become the center of our lives. This is how God has loved us. “God gave his Son,” Scripture says. Because a love that does not want to give everything is not really a love.
So we have the pattern set up and reinforced throughout the Scriptures today: God is love, love one another, we are God’s friends because we know what God is all about – we love as God loves. This is to be a permanent state of life, a sphere of existence, a world from which we act, an environment that shape us and reshapes our world. We would not know this love had God not shown it. We would settle for less, for something more casual, for something less demanding.
And this love has no limits. How slowly it dawned on the early believers that in Jesus God’s love had become universal. It took the coming of the Holy Spirit, as we see in the first reading, to show that this love extended to everyone. It’s not my God and then your God; it’s the one God of all humankind. It’s not my love, and your love; it’s all our love springing from, and returning to, that love which is God.
We hear the word “love” so often we want to yawn. It’s become sentimental schmaltz. I think that’s why Jesus insists his commandment is new and different. He asks us to love not according to our provisional patterns, but in accord with his unending one. “Love one another as I have loved you.” He has made us all friends, shown us what he is about, what God is about, and loved us completely. So Jesus becomes the standard of love and the reality that truly abides.
Life seems to be one change after another, even for those who don’t get to travel as part of their work. What holds those changes together? For many people it is precious little, their lives are so scattered. For us lucky believers, it’s the truth that everything is ultimately grace; and the best name for grace is unlimited love which only God can give us.