There’s a lot of suffering around and we see it day by day in our lives, in our circle and on our screens.
There’s also a lot of love around - as Christians we sense we are loved through and through by God and pray that more would share that saving knowledge!
If you were given the choice between a world with no suffering, but also no capacity to love or a world where suffering was allowed but everyone had power to love, which would you choose?
Surely we would choose the world where there was the power to love despite that capacity being yoked to the existence of suffering. The thing that helps us love is free choice even if that gives us power to sin. Without free choice there’d be no love, no sin and no suffering.
We worship a God who is love, who in today’s Gospel commands us to love. God never wants from us anything he hasn’t first given us. His command to love is inseparable from the truth revealed in Christ - that each one of us has been loved through and through from the foundation of the world. That awesome reality lies behind the words we just stood to hear from Our Lord in Matthew 22:37-39: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’
My great hero is 20th century theologian Austin Farrer. Seeing a phrase on a 1960’s poster for ladies corsets ‘for uplift, comfort and general support’ Farrer thought to himself and said: ‘The Church of England’.
Christianity is indeed ‘for uplift, comfort and general support’. To be uplifted though we need to put faith in God, place our hand in his, and go out of our way. We need discipline to counter our self-deception.
As I sought inspiration for a recent book the Lord spoke to me through today’s Gospel of love with an image of his hand reaching down to me, and my own hand grasping his, with its five digits expressing five loves.
These five loves are contained in Our Lord’s summary of the Law. Worship and prayer are the heart and soul of our love for God, Jesus implies, but without study, engaging the mind with divine teaching, that love will be ill formed, and without service, love of neighbour, and reflection, loving care of self, our loving God is a delusion.
Those five commitments - worship, prayer, study, service, reflection - make a hand that can grasp the hand of God reaching down to us in Jesus Christ to lift us into his praise and service with all the saints, an image of Love's endeavour to embrace us and make us agents of his love in a suffering world. Through that engagement, that disciplined relationship, we help change suffering from something destructive into something uplifting and transformative.
Last week I read of the death in St Christopher’s Hospice of its co-founder Dr Mary Baines, a palliative care physician who, with Dame Cicely Saunders, helped set up the UK’s first Hospice in 1967. She is quoted: “I have to say that I thought it very odd, this idea of caring for the dying… It was a new speciality, no one had done it before. Doctors had no interest in people who were dying; they were only interested in who could be cured.” Her obituary notes how ‘Baines had met Saunders in the Christian union of St Thomas’ Hospital in London when they were both doing their clinical training. Saunders had returned to train as a doctor after nursing a young Jewish refugee from the Warsaw ghettos. As he lay dying in pain, and fearing that his life had been “worthless”, he left £500 in his will to Saunders so that she could build a hospice… It was a petition that Saunders acted upon.’
Miracles like St Christopher’s and our own St Peter & St James are graphic evidence of how suffering can breed love and the house of the dying can through love become the hour of God and gate of heaven.
My book ‘Experiencing Christ’s Love’ comes out of my own sufferings and joys. It explores five loves of worship, prayer, study, service and reflection. It was commissioned by Bible Reading Fellowship to address a major flaw in western Christianity - lack of engagement with the disciplines that keep Christians Christian. At the heart of the book is counsel on self-deception. Attending worship may be inconvenient to us but ‘where there’s a will there’s a way’. The discipline of prayer isn’t necessarily accompanied by feeling God’s presence but you do it. Awkward questions about the Bible matter and there are times to get your head down and address them. We’ll never be good at serving others without shouldering humiliations sent to break the ego’s shackle round us. Unless we regularly examine ourselves and confess our sins to God ‘the truth is not in us’ to quote the Bible (1 John 1:8).
The God and Father of Jesus, a God of joyful goodness who loves us through and through, is our good news as Christians. As we seek him through the disciplines of Sunday worship, daily prayer, bible study, service and self examination he rubs off on us - not least through one another.
He says to us, mindful of the great love he has for us, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ God who loves us through and through also says through Ephesians 3:19: 'May you know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God’. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all evermore. Amen.
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