Reflections on John 15:9-17

Here are my reflections on yesterday’s Gospel reading, prepared for my worshipping community, Thunder Bay’s Urban Abbey.

This week, we have another encounter with that word abide – I translated it last week with the simple definition of remain. My old Greek prof from undergrad reviewed my reflection and the passage, and tossed out a few more of these simple translations, saying that this verb also has the sense of persisting and standing fast. Hold tight; don’t let go, that sort of thing. Allow me to break all the rules of defining words and translation practice and bundle all of these together. Here, then, is John 15:9:

As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you;

abide in

persist in

stand fast in

remain in

hold tight to

don’t let go of

my love.

How are we to abide in Jesus’ love? He tells us in John 15:10 – keep his commandments. This doesn’t sound particularly … gushy? gooey? lovey? Indeed, it even sounds harsh to our ears, living in an age of democracy, of questioning everything, of failed authorities at every turn. Show our love to Jesus by keeping his commandments? The dictionary game won’t get us out this time – indeed, injunctions and orders sound almost worse. Let’s look at how Jesus considers our keeping of his commandments — If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.

In English (and Greek), that’s a very straightforward future more vivid construction. It’s not saying anything about how much he loves us or about earning his love or whatever, but simply cause and effect. “If x, then y.” – “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love.” These two things are mutually feeding off each other. Christians are disciples of Jesus the Christ. We are his apprentices; he is our master. He has given us, through the apostles and apostolic writings, commands – “turn the other cheek”; “love your neighbour as yourself”; “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s”; “give to everyone who asks”; “pray like this”.

If we consciously choose not to follow his commandments, not to do those things that please him or that we know he knows are best for us, to what extent can we be said to be abiding, persisting, standing fast, remaining in his love? When we are wilfully disobedient to the teachings of our master, are we really holding tight to his love? Or have we let it go?

Here, we can easily start lengthy moralising. I will save us from such (although all of us need to hear some moralising sometimes—and recall that Jesus’ commandments are not burdensome, as we read today in 1 John 5:3). I want to circle back to the love being discussed here, that love we are abiding in. Let’s put both verses 9 and 10 together:

As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.

First of all, in verse 9, Jesus compares his love for us to the love the Father has for him. And then, in verse 10, he inverts it and speaks of his keeping of the Father’s commandments and abiding in the Father’s love. God is love; that was in last week’s reading from 1 John 4:8, in fact. I have spent a significant portion of 2021 teaching the Trinitarian theology of the ancient church—names like Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine (you’ve met them in these reflections!). Absolutely foundational for us to understand the Trinity is the fact that God is love. Love requires three elements, according to St Augustine:

1. The lover.
2. The beloved.
3. The love that exists between the two.

If God is love, there has never been a time when he did not exist as Trinity—love requires a beloved. God the Father is eternally begetting the Son outside of time through the fullness of His love, and the love of the Father and the Son together is made perfect as the Holy Spirit in that timeless eternity proceeds from the Father. God, moreover, is perfect, spotless, sinless, stainless. He is unfailing in his love.

Jesus says that he loves us in the same way that God the Father loves him. A perfect, unfailing, spotless, unwavering, steadfast, superabundant, unfathomable love. And consider what he chose to do for us out of this love: he left his eternal throne in glorious perfection and endless beauty with the Father, took on flesh, was hungry, tired, sore, pooped, was spat upon, abandoned, slandered, beaten, stripped naked, hung upon a cross. And then God died. This is how much God the Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, love us!

This is Good News!

And the moral exhortation part of this reflection is simply this: Go and do likewise. Keep Jesus’ commandments out of love for him, as a means of abiding in his love. And how do we keep his commandments? Let’s just consider John 15:12-13:

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.

Let us love one another. To the death.

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Going to church with wicked people

St Augustine, by Philippe de Champaigne

Related to Blogging Benedict: Punishment, today I read Ivo of Chartres (1040-1115), Ep. 186. In this letter, Ivo responds to a query from a monk named Laurence on questions of living with wicked (mali) people. The long and short of it, with testimonia from St Augustine and Pope Gregory VII (pope, 1073-1085), is that you must put up with them, by and large.

Receiving communion alongside a person whom you know (or think) is a sinner is not entering into communion with their wickedness but into communion with Christ. It is God who will judge such people. Our job is to love them. If their sin is privately known, you cannot refuse communication with them. If, however, they are impenitent, public sinners, then they should fall under excommunication from the proper orders within the church. Not, that is, you. Your job is to love them. Or, if they are excommunicate, to avoid them.

Remember the Augustinian line taken from the parable of the tares: If we try to pluck out the tares before the harvest, we may accidentally cut down some of wheat along with them.

Also, you shouldn’t receive gifts from the excommunicate on the grounds that, well, they are excommunicate. The earth, says Ivo (Augustine), is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. God doesn’t need their gifts. He wants their repentance.

Placing this letter in the wider context of Ivo’s thought, we need to remember that he argues for the discipline of the church as being a remedy. The goal of excommunication, as with penance, is to heal the sinner and help him’er not sin anymore.

The main point for us today is not to spend our lives sitting around in judgement of fellow churchgoers. It’s pretty easy sometimes. Perhaps you suspect someone of heresy. Or of drinking too much. Or of judgementalism due to being a teetotaller. Or of greediness. Or of any manner of personal/sinful deficiency.

It is not our role to sit in judgement on them. The merciful God is who rich in mercy, abounding in compassion whilst also perfectly just and wholly loving will do that, is doing that. Our job is to love others.

Mind you, I fear that the clergy may sometimes have to excommunicate, and I say that not just because Ivo does (for who is Ivo to me?) but because Ivo cites the apostles on the matter. Nonetheless, it is a grave thing and to be done with much prayer and for the goal of healing the broken Christian and the broken community, not in a spirit of vindictiveness and retribution.

Love and the moral code

Greater love hath no man…

Two evenings ago, the Second Lesson for Evening Prayer in the Canadian BCP included this famous passage:

Then one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together, perceiving that He had answered them well, asked Him, ‘Which is the first commandment of all?’

Jesus answered him, ‘The first of all the commandments is: “Hear, O Isreal, the LORD our God, the LORD is one. And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” This is the first commandment. And the second, like it, is this: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.’

So the scribe said to Him, ‘Well said, Teacher. You have spoken the truth, for there is one God, and there is no other but He. And to love Him with all the heart, with all the understanding, with all the soul, and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbour as oneself, is more than all the whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.’

Now when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, He said to him, ‘You are not far from the kingdom of God.’ But after that no one dared question Him. (Mark 12:28-34, NKJV)

This morning included 1 John 4:7-8:

Beloved, let us love one another. For love is of God, and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not, knoweth not God, for God is love.

I have discoursed on 1 John 4 here before.

I think we have an easy tendency to start to focus on all of the rest of the law. Or to immediately follow ‘love thy neighbour’ with, ‘Of course, the rest of the moral code is important as well’, or ‘Not that this means condoning sin, mind you…’ And, well, yes. Of course, the rest of the moral code is important. No, loving others doesn’t mean condoning sin.

But if that is the first thing we do after affirming our belief that loving other human beings is the second-highest calling of the Christian, are we loving others by doing so?

Loving others is a risky business. Opening your arms in embrace of someone else means that person might stab you in the back. Standing alongside those with whom we disagree might be misconstrued by everyone. Entering into someone’s life and pain might consume us.

Then again,

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. (John 15:13)

Nevertheless, it is worth asking how the law of love and the moral code of Scripture live together. Love is the highest and greatest command — and, as St Augustine is paraphrased, ‘Love God and do as you please.’ There is a chance that simply loving God and neighbour will take care of this question. Nonetheless, Scripture can serve as a guide for when we are uncertain.

I am one of those rare beasts — the Anglican who subscribes to the 39 Articles, the seventh of which says:

Although the Law given from God by Moses, as touching Ceremonies and Rites, do not bind Christian men, nor the Civil precepts thereof ought of necessity to be received in any commonwealth; yet not withstanding, no Christian man whatsoever is free from the obedience of the Commandments which are called Moral.

The 39 Articles elsewhere affirm that our salvation comes entirely from the grace of God, not our ability to live according to the moral code of Scripture. Such good works as we do perform come as a result of that grace and the justification that is by faith.

The moral code is succinct in the New Testament:

Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. (1 Corinthians 6:9-10, KJV)

Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. (Galatians 5:19-21, KJV)

This leads straight into:

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law. And they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts. If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit. (Galatians 5:22-24, KJV)

These are commandments to believing Christians, who are also commanded to live in love with everyone around them. They must be taken not only with ‘love thy neighbour’ but also with:

Judge not, lest ye be judged. (Matthew 7:1)

⁹ I wrote to you in my epistle not to keep company with sexually immoral people. ¹⁰ Yet I certainly did not mean with the sexually immoral people of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. ¹¹ But now I have written to you not to keep company with anyone named a brother, who is sexually immoral, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or an extortioner—not even to eat with such a person. ¹² For what have I to do with judging those also who are outside? Do you not judge those who are inside? ¹³ But those who are outside God judges. (1 Corinthians 5:9-13, NKJV)

It does seem that unrepentant, sinning Christians are to fall under censure from church authorities. That is not most people. Most people are either not Christians or repentant. None of us is truly free from sin, so it is no use using these verses to judge others even within the church — when churches do make use of such discipline on very rare occasion, it is after much prayer and consideration, and after different parties involved have been hurt or are causing hurt.

The rest of the time? LOVE. God will judge, and He will do what is most just, most holy, and most loving.

And now, some ancient Christian wisdom (taken from the Facebook page of that name):

Whoever sees in himself the traces of hatred toward any man on account of any kind of sin is completely foreign to the love of God. For love toward God does not at all tolerate hatred for man.

+ St. Maximos the Confessor

To judge sins is the business of one who is sinless, but who is sinless except God? Who ever thinks about the multitude of his own sins in his heart never wants to make the sins of others a topic of conversation. To judge a man who has gone astray is a sign of pride, and God resists the proud. On the other hand, one who every hour prepares himself to give answer for his own sins will not quickly lift up his head to examine the mistakes of others.

+ St. Gennadius of Constantinople

And the Desert Fathers (similarly from Facebook):

A brother who had sinned was turned out of the church by the priest. Abba Bessarion got up and went out with him, saying, “I, too, am a sinner.”

From the Sayings of the Desert Fathers

From Abba Agathon (The Sayings of the Desert Fathers; Cistercian Publications pg. 23):

“Whenever his thoughts urged him to pass Judgment on something which he saw, Abba Agathon would say to himself, ‘Agathon, it is not your business to do that.'”

I doubt that all of my thoughts are clear. All I know is that as I strive to live a righteous life, three important aspects of that are not judging others, being aware of my own sins, and figuring out how to love.

Quick thoughts on the injustice of grace

Image from the Orthodox Church in America

A call for papers passed through my inbox recently for a conference entitled ‘Divine (In)Justice in Antiquity and the Middle Ages‘. In my perversity, I immediately thought about this sublime post by Fr Aidan Kimel over at Eclectic Orthodoxy, St Isaac the Syrian: The Scandalous Injustice of God. If you’re pressed for time, I recommend that you skip my post and read Fr Aidan’s.

Anyway, I thought it would be a laugh to submit a paper to the conference about the injustice of divine grace in St Isaac the Syrian (‘of Nineveh’, d. 700) — to challenge our ideas of what it means when God is ‘unjust’. Generally speaking, when folks say that God is ‘unjust’, they really mean that God allows ‘bad’ things to happen to ‘good’ people. My paper, inspired by Fr Aidan and giving him full credit (of course), would use St Isaac to question this idea of just and unjust as well as bad and good in relation to divine-human relationships.

Upon further thought and reading the call for papers more closely, I decided that it wasn’t such a good idea — I can’t read Isaac in the original Syriac; I have yet to read his complete works; blog posts by Fr Aidan are the only secondary material I’ve read. The groundwork for me to produce an academic paper on St Isaac the Syrian is too great, even if the seed of a thesis exists. And I have a feeling that seed is correct.

Nevertheless, as I brough to the fore on my posts about St Augustine of Hippo and medieval Cistercians on divine love (here and here), God goes far beyond justice in His dealings with the human race, according to the teachings of historic Christianity. Whether one believes in apokatastasis as do St Isaac and Fr Aidan, God — the overwhelming Trinity that is, in His essence, agape, dilectio, love — loves us more than we can ask or imagine, and that love has overflown and continues to overflow in the divine action with regard to the human race.

Remember, as we were taught in Sunday School or heard from an evangelist on the street, the human race is fallen, broken, twisted, diseased, suffering. One glance at footage shot by drones in Homs, Syria, will show you that. One look at the clubbing scene in Glasgow on a Saturday will show you as well. Having turned our backs on God, and being ourselves ultimately ex nihilo, we are headed for destruction without God (see St Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation).

God loves us, so He comes to save us. Justice, which is balance (I always quote Ra’s al Ghul from Batman Begins for that), means that ‘bad’ things happen to ‘bad’ people. No one is good, no one is righteous — not one (Cf. Romans 3:12; Psalms 14:1-3; 53:1-3; Eccles. 7:0).

Yet when we were God’s enemies, Christ died for us so that we might become the friends and children of God, heirs of the universe. This is absolute, overpowering love, agape at its deepest and truest.

It is also, by the ancient understanding of justice (in a judiciary sense, typically a retributive idea), unjust.

All of this, of course, has been said better and more beautifully by St Isaac the Syrian.*

[Insert plug for Late Antiquity here.]

*Also said by the Newsboys, ‘When you get what you don’t deserve, it’s a real good thing. A real good thing.’

What do you mean, “God is love”? (Part One: dilectio and agape with St Augustine)

When I was 15, there was a very popular Barq’s rootbeer commercial where one of the characters, out of sight of another, proclaims, ‘What do you mean, “Barq’s has bite”?’ Here it is in all its glory:

That summer at camp, I was involved in a parody of that ad, only the guy standing at the booth was saying, ‘God is love,’ and Johnny was saying, ‘What do you mean, “God is love”?’ Johnny was handed a New Testament, took a look, and said, ‘Amen!’ instead of, ‘Ouch!’ (I think?)

The question has recently jumped into prominence for me because of St Augustine, De Trinitate, and the Church of England’s ‘Pilgrim Course’. Today I’ll deal only with Augustine.

In Books 8 and 9 of De Trin, St Augustine discusses love and knowledge, and how one can love that which one does not know. He also says that love is a potential analogy for the Holy Trinity, since love requires a lover, a beloved, and the love itself. He later rejects this analogy on the grounds that in order to love onself, lover and beloved are both the same. He later makes some other analogies from human psychology.

So — what do you mean, ‘God is love’?

The first thing we need to sort is ‘love’. When I was working for IVCF/IFES in Cyprus, we were reminded to be careful with how we use that famous phrase. A lot of the Nepali Hindus we met were liable to switch subject and predicate and then equate sex with love, producing a highly distorted view of what 1 John 4 is talking about!

St Augustine in these books of De Trin uses multiple words for love, annoyingly. When he actually cites, ‘God is love,’ he does so in a version of 1 John 4:16 that runs:

Deus dilectio est, et qui manet in dilectione, in Deo manet. (De Trin 8.VII (10))

God is love, and the person who remains in love, remains in God.

The Greek of the relevant portion is is:

Ὁ θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστὶν

God is agape. The Weber-Gryson edition of the Vulgate gives us caritas where Augustine has dilectio and the Greek agape. Caritas is the normal Latin translation of agape — hence older English Bibles with charity. I found myself perplexed by Augustine yesterday, no less so when he suddenly switched from dilectio to amor in Book 9, using it in much the same way! He did use caritas at one point in Book 9, to distinguish between it and cupiditas.

Semantics matter if we’re trying to figure out what somebody means.

It turns out that I may have a watered-down vision of dilectio, probably from some of the uses of its cognate verb diligo that seem weak in English — ‘to esteem’. Also, it is used commonly in late Latin letter-writing as ‘tua dilectio’ so frequently that any force of substantive love has been sucked out of it.o

Nonetheless, I learned from Lewis & Short’s Latin dictionary that this is a late Latin word and that Tertullian uses dilectio dei to refer to the love of God, and it is not entirely absent from the Vulgate. The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, in fact, cites nothing earlier than Tertullian for this word. According to that esteemed dictionary, dilectio is used in it primary sense as a synonym for the Greek agape and the Latin caritas.

So that settled what Augustine meant by dilectio. He meant love as in agape as in caritas.

Caritas/agape has traditionally been rendered into English as charity — observe the King James translation of 1 Corinthians 13.

This is the word that Lancelot Andrewes and his team chose to signify the highest form of love there is. Sadly, because of how we act/view ‘charitable’ deeds and almsgiving, charity in English tends to mean someone else’s leftovers that they really don’t want. It should, rather, mean a super-powerful love that is powerful enough to love the unlovely and unloveable. It is, after all, modelled upon the love of God — a love so large that while we were sinners, Christ died for us (Ro 5:8).

A prime example of what has happened to the word charity is that famous sermon Bono preached to then-President G. W. Bush several years ago. He said that Africa and the developing world don’t need charity — they need justice. And went on to press the President to improve the quality and quantity of American foreign aid.

In fact, actually, Africa doesn’t need justice. True charity is preferable to justice. Every time. Ra’s al Ghul may have had dastardly methods to execute what he felt was justice, but he was not wrong in declaring that justice is balance in Batman Begins. This is what the retributive justice system is about. Justice is when you get what you deserve.

Charity, on the other hand, looks at your deserts and chooses to give you better. In a universe shot through with charity, the Judge looks at you and takes your penalty. In a universe shot through with charity, the Father embraces you, knowing that you have a knife in your hand to stab Him in the back.

Augustine’s dilectio is meant to carry the same weight, although I didn’t quite get it without the lexicographical wonders of the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae.

But this is only one of the many ramifications of what is meant by “God is love”…

Humility, the foster mother of charity (Catherine of Siena)

Santa Maria Sopra Minerva

I am in Rome for about a month, starting earlier this week. One my wild research trips. Two days ago, I went into the church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva — Rome’s only Gothic church, run by Dominicans. While there, I saw the tombs of St Catherine of Siena and Fra Angelico. Because of my week in Florence, I am already well-acquainted with Beato Angelico, but St Catherine of Siena? Merely a name.

So I downloaded a (somewhat garbled) copy of her ‘Dialogue‘ onto my Nook eReader and have been perusing the works of the Sienese saint. The first section was essentially all about the necessity of persevering at prayer, and how God makes himself known to us through prayer, and that we need to clear our minds to pray.

Tonight at supper, I came across this striking passage:

No virtue, my daughter, can have life in itself except through charity, and humility, which is the foster mother and nurse of charity. (trans. Algar Labouchere Thorold)

I like the image of humility as charity’s foster mother and nurse.

Every once in a while I think about charity, and not just because Leo the Great has a habit of addressing people as tua/uestra caritas, but because charity, as understood properly, is one of the great theological virtues.

We have stained the word with the idea of our cast-offs, our unwanted things for unwanted people. In that famous ‘sermon’ he gave to George W Bush a few years ago, Bono said that what Africa needs from the West is not ‘charity’ but ‘justice’ — a mere tithe of the US Gov’t’s cash would ‘solve’ a lot of problems, says Bono.

But is that justice? I’m not sure. Given that justice has both a restorative and retributive side, I don’t think Africa needs or wants justice. Africa, and everyone we meet, needs charity.

It has been remarked (in the Friendship Book of Francis Gay one year, I believe) that when the translators of the KJV those long years ago needed a word to express the great, boundless, unfathomable, unconditional love of Almighty God, they chose charity, from Latin caritas, the word commonly used in the Latin Bible for agape — as in I Corinthians 13.

Charity, in the Latin Christian tradition, comes to mean that supernatural love that can love the unlovely, moving beyond the bonds of mere affection or the uncontrolled/uncontrollable amor. It is, as C S Lewis observes in The Four Loves, to love the unlovely. To love the unloveable.

It is a great thought. A powerful thought. One often left as mere ‘sentiment’.

And why?

Lack of humility, I think.

Certainly this is what holds me back from acting and feeling charitably towards others. Charity and compassion for the poor beggars on the street, charity for tourists in the way everywhere you go, charity for library employees, charity for people whose dogs poop on the sidwalk, charity for late buses/subways/train, charity for other drivers in traffic, charity for loud Americans in Europe, charity for queue-jumpers…

If I didn’t think I was better behaved, or too busy, or better educated, or too important, or in too much of a rush, or any of a hundred other comparatives that put me above others in one way or another, perhaps I would have more charity.

So humility. It is a powerful theme that runs through so many of the Fathers and Mothers and spiritual masters of Christianity. Let’s hunt it down and get ourselves into it, into the foster mother and nurse of charity (and without charity, what am I?).

Tomb of St Catherine of Siena