Written for the Sixth Sunday of Easter…
Beloved, let us love one another,
because love is of God;
everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God.
Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love.
In this way the love of God was revealed to us:
God sent his only Son into the world
so that we might have life through him.
1 John 4:7-9
For several weeks now, you may have heard me gush on and on about the power of the First Letter of John. What a gift it has been to pray with over these weeks. And this Sunday’s Second Reading hits the letter’s climax. As readers may have heard me say this before: This is worthy of our meditation and memorization. This is something we ought to know in our bones.
God’s love of us is the priority, here, in these verses. It’s instructional but also deeply personal for us. For it is only knowing that truth in the depths of our souls that we can respond to others and the world around us with love. Jesus’ revelation of the Father’s primordial love within the Trinity reveals, what the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) explains as love as the very being of God:
…St. John… affirms that “God is love”: God’s very being is love. By
sending his only Son and the Spirit of Love in the fullness of time,
God has revealed his innermost secret: God himself is an eternal
exchange of love, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and he has destined
us to share in that exchange (CCC, 221).
God has destined us to share in this enormous and eternal love. God is inviting us to know him deeply, that we might have a vibrant, living faith—“that we might have life through him.”
Jesus, call me deeper into your love, that my life may be shaped by that holy exchange with you, all the days of my life and beyond.
Pat Gohn
