love - tuesday after epiphany

Today we continue to reflect on our first reading, this time from the first letter of John.  Once more John speaks of love.  He always does.  In fact there is a story recalled by St. Jerome that John when he was already very old and people were all so eager to listen to him since he was the last living apostle, would always speak only of one thing, “My children, love one another!” One day he was asked why he kept on repeating the same message.  And he replied: ‘Because it is the Lord’s commandment, and if you keep just this commandment, it will suffice.”

Today as we reach the third part of the first letter of John the apostle is emphasizing that the initiative to love comes from God and not from us.  In this is love:  John wrote, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.  God loves us not because we are lovable, not because we did something good, not because we are good.  He loves us because that is his nature – God is love.  God loves the Blessed Mother and the saints, in the same way and with the same intensity that he loves you and me, and yes he loves in the same way and the same intensity also the criminals, the sinners, the drug addicts and the corrupt.  I know there are some people in your mind now that you would not even think God would love.  But sorry God loves them too in the same way and with the same intensity that God loves you.  Why?  Because that is God’s nature.

But what is love?  We always use the word love.  What is it?  I know some of you here love lechon, and more than anything they love to eat – they love chocolate, they love the dog, they love their house, they love the color of their hair.  But what is love, what is the love referred to by John?  

 I came across a definition made by a certain Jesuit, who said, love is “a passionate desire for the well-being of the other.”  First, passionate desire is a feeling, yes, but it is an intense feeling that moves one to do something.  Desire is a movement that can only rest when the good is obtained. And so to love it is not enough to wish the good of the other, to love it is not enough to feelings of compunction and pity on the other.  There is that desire that moves us to do something, to do good for the other.

Second love does not always mean giving in to what people want.  God does not love us that way.  If God did, with all my stupid and the sometimes selfish prayers, I would have already killed myself.  But God desires our well-being.  God does things for our own good.

And so St. John says, “Whoever is without love does not know God.”  Knowing for St. John is not just intellectual knowledge as in I understand.  No.  Knowing is experience, presence, it is being with – knowing means I have God in me.  It means God is present in you.  So how do we know that God is in us?  When we love, when we have in us that passionate desire for the well-being of the other.

Do we have that?  That capacity for loving, that movement in your heart to work for the good of the other, even and especially if you do not know the person you are helping, is a sign that God is in you, God is at work in you, God is overshadowing you.

Today is still Christmas but properly speaking it is epiphany, God reveals himself, God is no longer tucked in the belen unseen and unknown, God discloses himself, he makes known his presence to people, to the world.  All of us are instruments of his epiphany.  Jesus leaves the belen, he comes to our hearts, and reveals his presence in the love we have for one another.  This is St. John, the same John who would always tell Christians again and again, “love one another, because it is the Lord’s commandment, and if you keep just this commandment, it will suffice.”