1 John 4:11–18

I yearn to understand God and to love as He does.

When I love someone, I want to serve and give of myself to that person. I want to do what I can to see that the one I love is happy and fulfilled. However, God’s love seems to go far beyond my current view of what love is and what love requires. If I am called to love like Jesus, I need to understand how God’s love is different from mine. I want to be able to love in the way He wants me to love.

But what is LOVE…really? In this homily, Father Emmanuel Mbuk teaches about the true nature of God’s love.

In our R1 of today, the author spoke so profoundly and emphatically about LOVE, not as a feeling or an idea, but as the nature of God: namely, GOD IS LOVE. So real is this nature of God that John appealed to us passionately to remain, to embrace, and to live in this love.

“No one has ever seen God.”

Rightly, just as he acknowledged – “No one has ever seen God.” So, how then can we remain/be fused in that perfect love? The answer is not far-fetched: it is by loving one another. Unfortunately, the human love is generated from the heart as a feeling of attraction towards the other. This is not pure love because it is selective, self-serving and possessive. Such love is not a reflection/representation of the NATURE OF GOD.

God’s Love Made Visible and Perfect in Jesus

To demonstrate that genuine, sacrificial, and selfless love, John, mentioning the word LOVE, as many as 10 times in today’s passage, pointed to the fullness of God’s love made visible and perfect in Jesus, whom God sent as the saviour of the world. Hence, to acknowledge Jesus as the Son of God, God’s spirit is in us, and God is with us.

How Fear Gets in the Way

However, more often than not, we drift from the track of this pure/perfect love because of fear – fear of judgement, fear of failure, fear of not fitting in, which makes us to isolate ourselves, fear of being misunderstood/misrepresented, which makes us defensive, and get mad at people. These fears which are so loud cripple us, and make us to hide, pretend and to protect ourselves. This explains why many people bear their pain silently.

John’s words are very consoling/comforting, namely “There is no fear in love,…perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment, and so one who fears is not yet in love.”

Let us loosen ourselves into the ocean of God’s perfect love because fear limits our potentials. It makes us to worry about what will happen; what people think about us, etc. This already is a form of self-judgement.

Holding onto God’s Hand

Let us, therefore, open ourselves to God’s perfect love and let that fear lose its grip of our hearts and being. Let us think and apply God’s love to us in this way: imagine a child who is about to cross a busy road, not feeling afraid. Why is the child not afraid? It is because he/she is holding the parent’s hand. The busy road still poses the danger but the difference is that the fear is controlled because the child trusts the parent’s hand that he/she is holding. This is how God cares for and loves us.

When we are truly in God’s love, there is no need to pretend to be perfect because His perfect love is not a license to be careless or indifferent to sin. Rather, His perfect love heals us, frees us, makes us more patient with others and willing to forgive, and makes us spiritually mature so that we are ‘at home’ with ourselves and no longer afraid of failure. Let us love perfectly as God loves and let us REMAIN in God’s perfect LOVE.