Sweet society of love

FORMATION IS NOT PRIVATE Spiritual formation, good or bad, is always profoundly social. You cannot keep it to yourself. Anyone who says, “It’s just between me and God” has misunderstood God as well as “me.” Relationships must be transformed if we are to be transformed. 

Jesus gave a sure mark of the outcome of spiritual formation: We become people who love one another (see John 13:35). This love is not unspecified: “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another” (verse 34, NRSV, emphasis added). The “love” in question here is identified as what we do in Christ, as he has done for us. This love makes us ready to “lay down our lives for the brethren” (1 John 3:16). 

Failure to love others as Jesus loves us chokes off the flow of the eternal kind of life that our whole human system cries out for (see 1 John 3:14). To welcome others, to make a place for them and provide for them, is one of the most life-giving and life-receiving things a human being can do. These are the basic, universal acts of love. 

Our lives were meant to be full of such acts, drawing on the abundance of God. Such love is possible because of what God is: love. The profoundly good news is not just that God loves us. A pretty mean person can love someone for special reasons (see Matthew 5:46-47). 

But God is love and sustains love for us from his basic reality as love, which dictates his Trinitarian nature. God is in himself a sweet society of love where three persons complete a social matrix. Not only does each one love and receive love, but each has a shared love for another, the third person. The nature of personality is inherently communal, and only the Trinity does justice to what personality is. 

This sort of love is meant to happen routinely among God’s people. In the church as the body of Christ, members nourish one another with the transcendent power that raised up Christ from the dead and now flows through each member to the others.