God is Love

“God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. (1John 4:9-10)

During the first week of January (2025), many of the daily Mass readings come from the First Epistle of John, chapter 4; they are all about love. Love is a word we hear a lot. People get so excited when they talk about the things they love. They love their curly-haired poodles; they love Italian food; they love watching an old TV show they found on Netflix; they love ice cream cones, summer nights on the boardwalk, and British murder mysteries on TV (or maybe that’s just me). You get the idea. Anyway, John wasn’t talking about that kind of love. He was describing the kind of love that should always be spelled with a capital letter, Unconditional Love. That’s God’s kind of Love.

The readings from 1John are full of simple truths, ones we’ve heard many times and know so well. Verse 7 reminds us to, “love one another, because love is from God.” Verse 8 tells us, “God is love.” Verse 18 says, “perfect love casts out fear;” and verse 19 says, “We love because he first loved us.” Saint John sums it all up in verse 16: “So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”

All these daily readings lead up to Friday’s epistle which boldly declares, “For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome, for whatever is born of God conquers the world. And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith” (1 John 5:3-4).

Knowing God, keeping His commandments, and loving one another are inseparable. You can’t have one without the others. What better time to renew our commitment to Love than right now? And what better place to begin than in our own homes? The love that parents share with each other and with their children is the bond that makes a family strong. And when that love is grounded in knowing God and keeping His commandments, it becomes the kind of love that, “bears all thing, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7). That’s Love, Unconditional Love, and it should be spelled with a capital letter, because it is God’s kind of Love. “Love never fails!”