The intent of today is God as Love.

We only have to change one letter in this intent and we get, "God is Love". This was stated directly in the Epistle and implied in the Gospel. This is one of the clearest messages that comes through the New Testament about God, showing up in many other parts of this Testament as well.

The message about God as love in the New Testament is in contrast to many of the messages about God in the Old Testament, where the usual impression is of God as Creator, law-giver, awe-inspirer and fearsome being. In contradistinction to this, St John tells us, via today’s Epistle, that "There is no fear in love".

Many of us aged over forty years with a strict religious upbringing (and possibly some of us aged below forty) would have had the fear of God drummed into us from an early age and even now might have some remaining qualms with the idea that God’s love for us is fearless and our love for God should be likewise. Yet, avoidance of fear could be more important than some of us realise. One of the more influential books that I have read over the past few years is Betty J Eadie’s Embraced by the Light: What Happens When You Die? (1) This is an autobiographical account of what happened before, during and after the time that this Christian woman in the United States was clinically dead for few hours after an operation in hospital. Mrs Eadie reports that she was brought up in a Roman Catholic boarding school after her parents separated and her life was ruled by fear of punishment by the nuns running the school. These nuns taught her that God was vengeful and angry. However, when she was clinically dead she was taken up into the presence of God, where she learned that fear was one of the main negative energies, actually describing it as Satan’s greatest tool. She learned that when she had feared God as a child, she was unable to love God properly and had moved herself further away from him.

As well as being educated that "There is no fear in love", what else do we learn about God’s love in today’s readings?

We learn that God’s love is abiding. This means that it stays with us: God does not love us for a while and then abandon us. We learn that God’s love is perfect. That is, without blemish. We also learn that love brings joy.

It is not immediately apparent reading the English translations of the scriptures that divine love is different from human romantic love. In the ancient versions of Greek, however, that the books of the New Testament were either written or were translated early in the formation of today’s bible, there was a separate word for each of these forms of love. The word used for human romantic love was Eros, while the word for divine love was agape.

I read an interesting short article in The Canberra Times(2) recently about human romantic love. The article was about a study by two experts from separate Universities in the United Kingdom, who had found nine different types of human romantic love in partnerships in current British culture. These were:

1. Trust, recognition and support;
2. Cupid’s arrow or intense physical attraction;
3. hedonistic love;
4. ultimate connection and profound feeling;
5. demythologized or realistic love;
6. transformative adventure;
7. from Cupid’s arrow to role-bond relationship;
8. from Cupid’s arrow to friendship; and
9. Dyadic-partnership love or the merging of two people, where both partners put the relationship before their own individual needs.

While many of these are recognizable to us, some of these forms of Eros, especially the last mentioned, are closer to Agape than others.

While the list I have just mentioned seems plausible (apart from mentioning Cupid’s arrow three times), we should not regard it as statistically valid. Reading further on in this newspaper article, I discovered that the two researchers had based their results on a sample of only 50 people! This is only one ten-thousandth of one per cent of the population of the United Kingdom. I have a copy of the article if people are interested in reading it after our Eucharist today.

Turning from Eros to agape, E.J. Burton, one of the Bishops of our church, wrote a useful article on agape in 1984 (3). He pointed out that C.H. Turner, Professor of Exegesis at the University of Oxford, had shown that the derivation of the word agape meant that the word has a meaning closer to "that which is unique or essential to a relationship". This implies that God does not only love us, he also regards us as unique individuals who are vitally important and even essential to him. This idea is shown in the parable of the Good Shepherd, who leaves the 99 sheep who are still in the flock to search for the one lost sheep.

Having learnt about God’s love for us, both the Epistle and Gospel for today go on to the next step: that in response to God loving us, we have to love God and one another. Furthermore, we have to love each other in order to love God properly.