John, the son of Zebedee, was a simple man who fished the waters of the Sea of Galilee in the first century A.D. He joined Jesus after hearing John the Baptist proclaim that Jesus was the Lamb of God. He witnessed many of Jesus’ miracles, including the astonishing miracle of the healing of the Gerasene Demoniac. Witnessing Jesus heal this man through love and empathy revealed to John three truths: God is love; perfect love casts out fear; and love means that death is no longer something to fear.
Years after witnessing the miracle, John, an old man and the only surviving disciple of the original twelve, penned the Gospel that bears his name and wrote three letters to his followers. In the Gospel and Letters, we find the ultimate expression of God’s love for Christians and their love for God.
Specifically, John presents Jesus as the Logos, the Creative Word who loves all Creation. According to John, Christ is in all people, He is eternally present, and the world could not hold all the books that could be written to describe His wonderful works. In other words, the world could not hold the book of life that exists for every person. Each person hears the voice, each person reads the word, and in each person, there are miracles akin to the turning of water into wine, the raising of Lazarus, and the healing of the Gerasene Demoniac. Each person’s life is a unique miracle, and contains the basis of truth within it. In one’s own experiences, they can come to find the Word within himself. That same Word is alive and has become flesh in each person, even if most do not recognize it.
Agape: God’s Descending Love
Throughout his Gospel and Letters, John uses the Greek word agape (rather than the word eros) for love. According to Pope Benedict, agape is “descending love” because it is the love of God directed toward humans. To receive this love, humans must practice obedience to abide by God’s will. “We can thus understand how agape also became a term for the Eucharist,” Benedict wrote in Deus Caritas Est, “there God’s own agape comes to us bodily, in order to continue his work in us and through us.” He continues:
…the love-story between God and man consists in the very fact that this communion of will increases in a communion of thought and sentiment, and thus our will and God’s will increasingly coincide: God’s will is no longer for me an alien will, something imposed on me from without by the commandments, but it is now my own will, based on the realization that God is in fact more deeply present to me than I am to myself. Then self-abandonment to God increases and God becomes our joy.
Thus Pope Benedict XVI describes how our proper use of free will in the context of grace is itself our loving response to God.
Similarly, in his first letter, St. John declares that the person who keeps God’s ways has the love (agape) of God. This love is active, not just through words, but through doing things for others, hence for God. John wrote further that love comes from God, it is how we know God, for God is love. When we love other humans and creatures, we are exercising the love that God has granted us, and in return we are loving Him. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God’s love lives in him.
Love Overcomes Death
In John’s words, what is more important for us who naturally fear death is his proclamation that “perfect love casts out fear.” There is no fear in love. Fear is about punishment—the Greek word is torment—and the person who loves does not fear torment.
John is referring to the ultimate punishment, death, which all humans fear. Though death once was a punishment of Adam and Eve, with Christ, this punishment has been overthrown. Death is how we are reunited with God, Who is Love. There is no fear in God, and so there ought to be no fear in death, since it is the means through which we are united with Love. Thus John concludes that one who fears has not yet been perfected in love.
But is it truly possible to be perfected in love before death?
To Be Still and Know God
To be still and to know God is to accept His love. To love God is to abide in God. When God loves me, He abides in me. Now, in this present moment, I can accept God’s will, know His presence, and feel a moment without fear. John writes that “no man has ever seen God,” so the “proof” we have of Him is love. To love one another is to experience and to abide in God—to accept His transcendent will and His presence. Therefore, being still allows the presence of God to overwhelm fear.
Contrarily, exercising one’s own will cultivates fear.
John’s authority for his teaching was granted through Christ and his experiences watching Him love others. John saw how Jesus healed Legion, the demoniac. He was present when Jesus drove the legion of fear from the man and left him with a legion of love. John saw the power of Jesus’ teaching. He learned that there is no fear in death because death is the reunification with Love itself.
Such experiences informed John that Jesus was and is the Logos, an idea long wrestled with by Greek philosophers who unfortunately never saw it fully realized in the person of Christ. But John did. He witnessed the Logos in person. He saw Truth in the flesh healing, loving all creation, teaching, suffering, and dying.
As Pope John Paul II taught, Jesus’ willingness to suffer for the sake of love teaches us that our suffering, too, is for the sake of love—and therefore it is not to be feared.
Pope Benedict XVI wrote, “God is the absolute and ultimate source of all being; but this universal principle of creation—the Logos, primordial reason—is at the same time a lover with all the passion of a true love.” Benedict refers to God’s love, agape, as oblative love: It is a love that gives, that offers, that serves, that sacrifices. Oblative love is love that does not expect anything in return: praise, gifts, fame, physical comfort. This is the love the Church teaches. Such love is often invisible, done in secret, anonymous.
Moving Toward a Society of Love
The Greeks, such as Plato, who conceived of the Logos, also conceived of the possibility of a perfect society. Plato wrote of such a society in The Republic, arguing that only philosophers can know Truth, and that a society built on such Truth would be a perfect society. Plato’s society was based on the ideal of justice. He knew there had never been a society that was governed by justice or by truth. The Greeks’ attempts to do so failed.
But then Jesus Christ came among us. He taught us to love. If the Church has any great surpassing goal among all others, it is to bring all people to come to know God’s love. When everyone knows God’s love, when they practice love on earth, only then will humans approach the ideal that Plato suggested in The Republic and, better still, the society of love that Jesus preached throughout the Gospels.
Editor’s Note: This article is part of a CE original series on the History of Love, pursuing the meaning of love and our understanding of it throughout time.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
