The Gravity of Love

Acts 10.44-end; Psalm 98; 1John 5.1-6; John 15.9-1

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” (John 15.12)

I was at a birthday party in St John's Wood the other day in a flat that overlooked the famous Abbey Road Studios.

It made us all remember our heady teens when the Beatles recorded ‘All you need is love’ in those same studios. It was the first global live TV link to 26 countries and 400 million people – it was the summer of 67. And it was the forerunner of the Eurovision Song Contest in the days when Royaume-Uni simply assumed pre-eminence.

‘All you need is love’, wrote John Lennon.

It was a nice idea, in troubled times, but it was lacking in content and context. It could include everything and nothing. As the Peanuts character Linus put it: “I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand!”

“All you need is love” is both similar to and yet very different from Augustine’s aphorism: “Dilige et quod vis fac” (Epist. Joann. Tractatus vii.8) “Love and do what you want.”

The context of Augustine’s statement is not the fluffy, feely 60s factor. It is the gravity of God’s love as we see it in the Gospel of Christ; and as we respond in love to that movement of God towards us.

If there is a common theme in today’s readings, it could perhaps be God’s unconditional love for us.

When Jesus says ‘I have chosen you. You have not chosen me,’ he is not making a statement about who he does and doesn’t choose.

Rather he is indicating that the movement has always been from God to us. It is unconditional love. As Paul says to the Romans, it was ‘while we were still sinners, Christ died for us’ (Rom 5.8)

The Psalm today reminds us that: “He hath remembered his mercy and truth toward the house of Israel: and all the ends of the world have seen the salvation of our God.”

It was revealed in space and time and in a geographical and national setting, the Holy Land; but it was for all the ends of the world and all time - cosmic.

The reading from the Acts of the Apostles records the moment when the early church realised that the Gospel of God’s love was not just for the Jewish people, not localised, but for the gentiles as well - universal.

The Gospel and the epistle of John remind us that the right response to this unconditional love is to obey God’s commandment.

And what is that commandment? “This is my commandment,” says Jesus, “ that you love one another as I have loved you.”

And so we ask further, how did Jesus love us?

He loved us unconditionally and he demonstrated it by the most awful example: “Greater love has no one than this”, Jesus says, “that he lay down his life for his friends.”

He doesn’t demand change in order that he might love us and accept us as friends. He welcomes us as we are and lays down his life for us.

The ancient symbol of the pelican (seen on the front cover of the order of service and in many of our churches) feeding her young with blood from her own breast, is a powerful picture of the self-giving love of Christ.

Unconditional love, is a very difficult thing for most of us to bear. In our human relationships we rarely experience it. The love of a mother for her child is probably the nearest we get. Indeed, unconditional love can be destructive in a relationship.

Most of us experience at some time what it is to love too much. Or we may have been so unconditionally loved that we felt smothered and imprisoned.

All human love is touched by imperfection. Which is why ‘All you need is love’ does not win the day.

Although we don’t like to admit it, our love is always and necessarily conditional to a greater or lesser extent.

I had a friend Ed, who was a rugby blue and was converted in the university mission. A few days later we were walking to a Bible study when one of his rugby friends came up and said playfully: ‘so you’re a Christian now?’ Ed said ‘yes’ and his friend then giggled and slapped him round the face.

Without hesitating, Ed slapped him back so hard that he fell to the ground. As he was staggering up Ed said: ‘of course I’m not a very good Christian.’

All human love is less than perfect.

Only Divine love is touched by perfection.

We sang earlier: ‘Come down, O love divine,
seek thou this soul of mine…’ Bianco da Siena goes on to say: ‘for none can guess its grace,
till Love create a place
wherein the Holy Spirit makes a dwelling.’

In other words, it is God’s love, mysteriously at work within us, by his Holy Spirit, that enables us to respond fully in love towards him and towards one another.

You remember that Jesus was asked what is the greatest commandment and he replied:

“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind… and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Matt 22.37-9)

I’ve preached before about these three aspects of our love for God: loving God with our whole being: the affective, reflective and intellective; heart, soul and mind; strong love with the checks and balances that our reason and emotional maturity bring.

If we love God in this way, then we cannot but help love our neighbour as ourselves. This is the second commandment, inextricably linked with the first. And it is not an easy command to keep.

GK Chesterton once remarked that the Bible tells us to love our neighbours and to love our enemies because they are generally the same people!

To live above with those we love, O that will be glory.
To live below with those we know, well that’s a different story.

Loving one another begins with family and friends and church, but then it spreads out into the wider world.

This unconditional love of God for us means we will care for the homeless and the refugees; we will protect the weak; we will look out for one another. And we will build societies and churches that do this.

If we do not, then we deceive ourselves, and we do not genuinely love God, with heart and soul and mind.

We have some shallow lightweight love which does not reflect the heaviness of God’s love for us.

Soon we come to the altar of God: the passion of Christ. We don’t come because we’re good enough for God, or live exemplary lives. We come because he loves us, just as we are, and wants to take us deeper into the depths of his love.

Let me finish with a short poem by one of my friends called ‘Gravity’ which speaks of the unconditional love of God coming down to us in the person of Jesus.

Gravity

The apple, unlike Adam, had no choice but to fall
Speeding to fulfil its creator’s call.
But what force drew him down to us?
He, with a starlit infinity to explore,
He, who could peer into a neutron’s core,
He, who had spoken a thousand million times
And known the sulphuric spit of our self-vaunting crimes
He, whom we had called murderer, liar, thief
And left for dead with enlightened relief.

What force drew him down from above
To reap the grim harvest of rebel pride,
Hammered with nails of truth denied?
What force drew him down from above?
What force but this: the gravity of love.
(Mark Green, November 1994)