3rd Sunday of Easter (C ) 4 May 2025 Love at the source
Our dealings with God are personal; to us they can seem impersonal. We tend to see love as human to human, and that is the stuff of love stories. Imagine a film ending with the couple going to church to worship God!
We keep the commands and that goes some way. For example, I do not steal.
But if I do good and avoid evil, not just because it is a
command, but because I value the person who would be hurt – that is more like
how it is supposed to work.
I would not hurt you because I value you as a person. Most people we don’t know personally, but we respect their human dignity. Therefore we treat people with kindness, courtesy etc.
This all comes from God, the giver of all that is good. We love people because God loved us first. He loves me and the other person. We return some of that love to him, we hope increasingly. We learn to love one another as an extension of God's love for us.
This makes it easier to keep the commands, so they are not just seemingly random interruptions. The sourcing of these commands from God indicates their meaning and power.
Christ is risen is good, but better still if we love Him. Take Mary Magdalene who loved Our Lord more than the other disciples did, and so experienced more fully the sorrow of the Crucifixion and the joy of the Resurrection.
We might say I don’t want to love that much, but this is the way forward, to be discovered. We will be much happier if we go this way than not. A life of sin is a life of misery, slavery and possibly even damnation. If we can cultivate the personal sense of God we are dealing with goodness itself.
We learn to love goodness itself; no longer abstract, but part of us.
This is better than human to human love, which is limited. With God at the source we can love another person in the love of God for us. It becomes a community of love, all the better.
When Jesus asks Peter, do you love me, it is to probe Peter, and get him to take a longer look at his motives
Feed my sheep means go out in the strength of my love and bring it to others.
Many would see God as a kind of remote presence, having some influence but not much.
Our world with all its buying and selling is the real world, they will say, and talk of heaven etc is vague and abstract, therefor less real.
In fact it is the other way round. The things of heaven are stronger and firmer than the things of earth.
In heaven we find the fulness of love and most of all its reliability; it does not betray or disappoint as mere earthly love will do.
Peter betrayed Jesus although he did not want to, but his earthly nature was too strong at that point. When fortified by deeper exposure to real love Peter was much stronger at Pentecost.
To love many others is also challenging but Paul shows how he could do this. He was so immersed in the love of Christ that he had enough left over for the anonymous communities. He really did love the people that he did not personally know.
God does know us by name and every detail about us, so He also can include everyone at once.
Love is making oneself vulnerable to another. God does that in His own nature, the Trinity, and helps us to do the same as far as we can, and with the largest possible vision of what is at stake.
Yes, Lord, You know I love You…
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