This last week (a week where everyday was warm enough to fry eggs on the asphalt, by the way) one of the texts we read during our prayers, and that particularly touched me, was John's first letter:
This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.
This is how we know that we belong to the truth and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence: If our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.
1 John 3: 16-20
It is very poignant, from many aspects: How Christ's sacrifice impels us to a different life, how one can not simply live of words, and how even in the restlessness of our hearts, God does not condemn us.
We frequently sing in Taizé Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est and I think that at the core of this passage is precisely Caritas, love, the virtue seen by Paul as the highest of all. When we read John questioning himself of how can one with material possessions ignore their brothers and sisters and still expect God's love to be in them, it reminds us of Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae definition of Caritas: not only that which binds us to God, but also what most of us understand from the overused word charity: the love of others.
So, we come to the part that particularly touched me: Let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.
This is nothing considerably new to us, we hear frequently similar adages such as actions speak louder than words, but in this context it does make us reflect on our colective conscience as christians. Are we practising the love we preach?
Also in First John (1 Jn 4:20) we read: " Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen,cannot love God, whom they have not seen. "
To me this is particularly striking when we take in account the debate in Europe on migration. We are supposed to help every brother and sister of ours (and not just of our faith), and yet there is an immense backlash on this subject. It wounds to see the political instrumentalisation of christianity, forsaking the core of it's message, reducing it to a mere cultural common divisor.
There is certainly this vein in our society, that strips away the gospel of it's living-word essence, and transforms it into a vulgar traditionalism (not far of from paganism, a set of rites that confer identity to a tribe), and I wish that we could all see how many of us are sometimes duped just because things have been framed in a tribalistic manner.
Channeling Jacques Ellul, the biblical teaching always contests political power, which is what is intended with these appropriations.
For many, the Bible is just an old dried-up book with some nice poetry and moral philosophy, but for the ones that see the word of God has the source of new life, it is essential to act upon it.
When we read that our heart might condemn us it is because we will always feel unworthy and unsure of our path, there is certainly, as Kierkegaard wonderfully put, a degree of anxiety derived from the freedom given to us by God.
So, we must put our trust in God, and always go back to the bible, always seek there what is asked of us in our conduct, and then transcribe the words into actions, live charity.
Francisco
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