Words on the Word
What is Love?
A homily given on the last full days of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference, which has been in session in Trondheim this week.
1 Corinthians 8.1-13: Love makes the building grow.
Luke 6.27-38: Love your enemies.
At all times men and women have loved to talk about love. Our time is no exception. It has this peculiarity, though: discourse about ‘love’ these days tends to have an edge of anger. Ubiquitous rainbow flags with the inscription ‘Love is love’ blow with an air of implicit indictment, perceived as a comfort by some, as a threat by others. What it means to ‘love’ one’s nation has become such a contentious question in many countries that certain manifestations of such ‘love’ are declared illegal. And what are we to say about the little ‘loving’ hearts people use to take up positions online, mostly anonymously? Do they not often convey disdain of the opposite? It would seem that a declaration of ‘love’ today is often an expression of self-assertion, a claim to entitlement, a way of drawing a line of demarcation between myself and those who ‘love’ things I do not ‘love’.
What a contrast with the New Testament notion of love put before us in our readings! Love, says St Paul, is the opposite of self-importance. He associates love with the growth of a building. That image is eloquent when we recall his focus elsewhere on our call to be ‘living stones’ in God’s temple. Love on this account is readiness to sustain tension, to consider one’s call and stick with it, come what may, remaining steadily in place so that others can reckon with us in Christ’s name and securely construct their existence around us, the result being an environment of shelter and security for all.
Our Lord in the Gospel is more radical still. For him, love is the overcoming of sentiment. To love as Jesus commands is to abandon, once for all, any weight-and-measure standard of reciprocity: you’ll scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours, else I’ll leave you to your itch. Jesus tells us to love ‘without any hope of return’; to pour ourselves out uncalculatingly. His is a call to self-outpouring at once heroic and unselfconscious, therefore light.
This is the stated madness of the Gospel. The risk involved is real. Christ’s cross is a reminder that we live in this way staking our lives. Yet that is not all. Even hesitant attempts to follow his teaching let us verify no less the truth of the measure pressed down, shaken together, running over into our laps as an explosion of grace — and the reality of a joyful peace this world cannot give. We begin to recognise, then, the boundlessness that marks genuine love, and the beatitude of gratuitous self-giving. For such love our time is hungry. One cannot live on substitutes indefinitely, and love is what we’re made for.
May we know the real deal, then, and share it freely. Amen.
Thursday of the 23rd week of Year B, Ordinary Time
Detail from the interior of the cathedral of Braga.