Love God

Some students organized a special worship service around the theme of love. This theme had four facets: love God, love friends, love enemies, love neighbors. A speaker was assigned to each facet, and I was given the first. Mine was the least interesting reflection, especially since the “love enemies” meditation was given by a Chinese Christian recounting how odd it was for him to hear J.D. Vance claim that Jesus demands the most intuitive, natural, concentric-circle-emanating “order” of love. I post mine here anyhow. Blessed Ordinary Time to each and all.

Professors are just kids who never quite got the hint that it’s really annoying to keep asking “why?” about everything.

So here I am, a professor, who was given the task of saying a word or two on the theme: “Love God.”

And here I am, a professor, who asks: “Why love God?”

I came up with four answers.

Sunday School Answer: because Jesus once said that the greatest commandment is to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.”

So we should love God because Jesus said so.

Why did he say so?

(I can hear it now: “Little brat.”)

Theological Answer: because God first loved us. We have done nothing whatsoever to earn or force God into caring about us. God loves us and so we exist.

My kids like to ask theological questions (shocker). One time, one of them asked me, “Dad, where was I before I was born?” Just before I launched into Origen’s speculations about the preexistence of souls (kidding, kidding), my daughter answered her own question: “I think I was in God’s brain.”

I think that’s on the right track. We were in God’s brain as God’s own intention, God’s own object of desire, God’s own beloved. A sixth-century Christian writer called Dionysius said that God’s act of creating the world was God’s own act of ecstasy, of ecstatic love. God’s ecstasy, God’s ek-stasis, “standing” or going out of Godself. God, he said, “was beguiled by the thought of each one, beguiled by the beauty of his beloved,” and so it was his very longing for what was not that that made what was not, be.

So we should love God because God first loved us. That we are at all already proves that we are loved.

But…why does God love us?

(Ugh, come on now.)

Philosophical Answer: because God himself is everything lovely—the True, the One, the Just, the Beautiful, the Good. When you love something good or true or beautiful, you love the very source of that something—God. When you love something lovable, you love the author of that lovableness—God. And besides, what’s more lovely than love itself?

We love to love and to be loved.

Love is who God is. First John says that. When we love anything, the love by which we love is God. St. Augustine said that.

Ask yourself: Why do you love anything or anyone that you love? It’s true that, if pressed, we could produce a list of reasons.

But if we’re honest, the ultimate reason is nothing less than the beloved him or herself. They are the reason to love them.

Loving doesn’t need an external aid to prop it up. It doesn’t need some pragmatic purpose to justify itself. Nothing truly valuable does. Bach’s Cello Suites 1-6 require nothing more than their own irresistible beauty to provide us the reason why they were created.

Even more so with love.

And God is love. That is alone is why we love God.

But…um, ok…why then do we even need to articulate all these reasons to love God?

(Enough.)

Existential Answer: because in a world of hate and sin and death, it is all but impossible to remember that God is love.

Last semester I had two relatives die unexpectedly. I’ll never forget, at my aunt’s funeral, what my uncle bellowed repeatedly: “It ain’t right! It ain’t right!”

Set aside love if you can (you can’t) and this makes no sense at all. How is death not right? It’s an ironclad law governing everything that’s ever lived. Death seems the end of all things, the apparently apodeictic conclusion to everything that breathes (or doesn’t).

But then I recall Song of Songs 8:6. In a book mostly about erotic love, this is the only place where the poet addresses the nature of love itself.

“Set me as a seal upon your heart,

As a seal upon your arm;

For love is strong as death,

Passion fierce as the grave.

So love alone contends with death.

Its flashes are fleshes of fire,

A divine flame.

So love is a divine flame; God is love.

Many waters cannot quench love,

Neither can floods drown it.

So love prevails over the primordial waters of Gen 1—creations’ true foundation.

If one offered for love

All the wealth of one’s house,

It would be utterly scorned.

So love cannot be assigned a number value—it is infinite.

In short: God is love, and so despite every appearance to the contrary, love is the truth.

My uncle’s cry, “It ain’t right!” is love’s cry, and only love’s.

Love is God within us demanding resurrection.

Wittgenstein somewhere said, “Only love believes in the resurrection.”

Or as Paul dared to put it, “Love believes all things.”

Resurrection, death’s defeat. The resurrection of every last burgeoning relationship or budding flower or scintillating sunset or brilliant work of art or selfless act of love—all of this is lovable.

Therefore all of this is the truth.

God is love.

Why else would we love God at all?