‘God is Love’
1st Epistle of St. John chapter 4
The Nicene Creed has been the standard-bearer for the Christian faith for the past 1,700 years. It was agreed at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, and it has been embedded in the liturgies of all significant Christian denominations since then. A creed is a clear definition of what people believe in; so it is extraordinary that the word which is absolutely central to the Christian faith is totally absent from the Nicene Creed: love.
St. John was the longest-living of Jesus’s disciples, and in his later years he lived on the island of Patmos. It is there that he is thought to have written the book of Revelations, the last in the Bible, and he also composed his two letters, containing the really simple essence of the Christian faith as in the statement at the start of this commentary: that the nature of God is love.
Christian scholars would tell you that the origins of the Nicene Creed were in a range of dogmatic differences and the Creed therefore represented a convergence, in order to express faith in the Holy Trinity of God. Of course, that's fine to resolve differences: that’s exactly what politicians and business leaders do all the time, as they struggle to find common ground.
But to leave out the word 'love' which is right at the centre of Gospel teaching — to love our neighbours as ourselves (however different they may be, thereby showing our love for God) and even to go so far as to love our enemy — Is extraordinary. Indeed, the absence of that word 'love' may explain why so many conflicts have arisen between different Christian followings over the past two millenia, including the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, spurred on by Patriarch Kirill, leader of the Russian Orthodox Church.
The focus on love is central to the Christian season of Christmas and, as we wind down for the annual break this month, setting time aside to see what we can do for others, it's particularly important that children and young people both receive and share love.
Having written our commentary ‘Inter-generational Incoherence’ just last week, it was therefore good to see the Government issuing its statement on tackling child poverty last Friday. However, when you see important issues like this being tucked away at the end of a week, you know it’s a silent admission that the substance falls well short of the mark.
And indeed it did: it concentrated on the need for proper housing and nutrition, mainly focusing on the removal of the 2-child cap, but there was nothing to address the journey from childhood to adolescence. Meanwhile the DWP announcement over the weekend about getting young adults into work featured a lot more stick than carrot, concentrating as it did on the removal of welfare benefits for those who don’t comply.
Jesus’s birth was in the most humble of settings: in a stable, surrounded by animals. This was followed by a long and arduous journey into exile in Egypt, until the threat from Herod had gone; so his early childhood was marked by real poverty and disadvantage.
But there can be no doubt that his subsequent journey into adolescence was critical to character formation, and he clearly achieved a total attitudinal transformation, which we first see in the Gospels in the forty days and forty nights resisting temptations in the wilderness.
That's why the journey through adolescence is as critical as the childhood years, and we need to see that in inter-generational strategies established for young people today. This means providing the necessary resources and life skills, not weighing young people down with obligations and debt. It also means providing a reliable structure of family guidance to encourage stability and security of relationships.
So it all comes back to that all-important word ‘love’. You'll hear lots about love in Christian churches over Christmas, but it would be really good if it could be included in the central statement of our faith which is the Nicene Creed.
In this respect it might be worth ending this week with these words of St. Paul which are so familiar at weddings. He clearly agreed with John about the centrality of love in the Christian faith:
‘If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.
When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.’
Gavin Oldham OBE
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