“All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.”
The bond of the universe, the harmony of things, the negation of difference, the fact at the root of every vision, revealing that love is the only good in the world, and selfishness the one thing hateful, in the city of the loving God, is the devotion of the Son to the Father. It is the life of the universe. It is not the fact that God created all things that makes the universe a whole; but that he through whom he created them loves him perfectly, is satisfied to be because his father is with him. For there can be no unity, no oneness where there is only one. For the very beginnings of unity there must be two. Without Christ, therefore, there could be no universe. The reconciliation wrought by Jesus was the necessary working out of the eternal antecedent fact, that God and Christ are one, the Son loving the Father and the Father loving the Son as only the Father and Son can love. The prayer of the Lord for unity between men and the Father and himself springs from the eternal need of love. But for the Father and the Son, no two would care a jot the one for the other. It might be right for creatures to love because of mere existence, but what two creatures would ever have originated the loving? But if the Father loves the Son, if the very music that make the harmony of life lies in the burning love in the hearts of Father and Son, then glory be to the Father and the Son, drawing us up into the glory of their joy, to share in the thoughts of love that pass between them, in their thoughts of delight and rest in each other, in their thoughts of joy in all the little ones. The life of Jesus is the light of men, revealing to them the Father.
Commentary
by Diane Adams
Of all the words in the English language, love might be the most difficult to define. It’s sort of like kindness, but more. A bit like forgiveness, but not limited to that. There is no scientific equation for it, no evolutionary need we can discover that makes it essential to existence. But it’s still the one force nearly everyone agrees makes life worth living. Love is like an ocean, it has a million shores, but cannot be contained by one. It’s an emotion, but it’s also a verb. It is light in the darkness of our souls. We cannot even prove it exists, but we all know it when we meet it. In fact, love actually sounds a lot like God, doesn’t it?
I’m a love literalist. I believe all love is God’s love, think quite literally that God is love. Wherever you see love, even (gasp) in the lives of sinners, God is there. Love is his presence, and inside we are hardwired to seek it every day, regardless of our religious views or lack thereof. We are forced by the need for love to come outside of ourselves and reach for one another.
From the need love has for an object, it’s easy to see why God chose a Son to complete himself. Love, it seems, cannot exist alone. And so it’s possibly out of a natural overflow of love that he made us, this world and its creatures--for the purpose of expanding his love, further and further into a still mostly empty space. Love grows between us, then replicates itself from those who love into those who do not yet know love.
Some people are harder to love than others. Just as God brought love into being between himself and the Son, we can create love with those who love us, storing it up almost like fuel to confront the difficult cases. Love is a force that is generated between two people. A union of the soul with Jesus is the highest capacity generator. As servants, apostles of love, we are to go out and spread love into the lives of as many as we possibly can.
Not everyone will love us back. Some people charge that battery, while others deplete it. So you go back to the Source, and the people he has given you who love you, to get a charge for loving those who don’t. Perhaps this is one reason why God insists on community among his followers. Because you cannot give what you do not have, and you cannot make love on your own.