Monday, May 7, 2012

EASTER VI 2012


Hendrick ter Brugghen The Calling of St Matthew (1612)
"You did not choose me, but I chose you"

The theme of love is especially prominent in the Epistle and Gospel for this week, both from John. It is a theme to which contemporary Christians warm very readily since it is relatively ‘theology-lite’, so to speak. Yet it is easy for it to amount to little more than a rather thin doctrine about the desirability of care and concern for others. Concern for others is admirable, certainly, but it hardly requires the Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection of God to make the case for it. Human decency is enough, surely.

Is there an animating spirit that informs the world in which we live? Modern materialism makes physical forces and biological processes the ultimate explanatory factors, and leaves us to conceive of happiness as enjoying  life to the best of our abilities -- to the extent that life and time will let us. Did Jesus have an enjoyable life? The question seems all wrong somehow. He tells his followers to "abide in love", but this love of life, he says, can find its fullest expression in "laying down one's life for one's friends" -- not ultimate satisfaction or enjoyment, that is to say, but ultimate sacrifice.

How could that make sense? If the world into which we are born is indifferent (or even hostile) to our deepest attachments and aspirations -- love, justice, beauty, truth -- we must wrest from it what we can while we can, and do so under the constant shadow of our own mortality. But if those things on which our hearts are most deeply fixed lie at the foundation of reality, if they are the things that called us into existence in the first place, then there is a profound harmony between the human spirit and the creative energy that underlies the world.

Love is ultimate, not because we can make it our Ultimate Concern, but because the Eternal Word has made it the spirit that infuses all things. We do not choose God; God has already chosen us.

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