Love is a two way street

LOVE IS A TWO-WAY STREET

Jn. 3:14-21

There was a young man who was madly in love with this beautiful woman.  He was convinced that no other man had ever loved any other woman as he loved her.  She was on his mind day and night.  He tried to see her every day.  After an exciting courtship he married her.  Two years later they were divorced!  What the young man thought was true love and what the woman hoped was true love was just infatuation.  Once married the infatuation wore thin.  Now they didn’t even like each other and they wondered what they ever saw in each other.

The question of true love comes up in other areas, for example in parent-child relationships.  I have seen mothers who were utterly devoted to their children, or so it seemed.  Everything revolved around their babies.  As time passes this obsession began to wear thin.  It became more and more apparent that the mother was not loving her children but domineering and controlling them.  The question we can ask from today’s Gospel is how do we recognise true love?

There are some words in the Gospel that can help us.  “God so loved the world that He gave…”  It is telling us that giving is essential and the highest joy in love.  This is not to say that true love never needs, or wants or receives, for true love does involve wanting to be loved.  Not even God can give all the time without ever receiving.  It wouldn’t seem right.  Picture a marriage in which the husband does all the giving and none of the taking.  He never needs to be comforted, at times pampered, encouraged and loved.  It would be a very strange marriage.  Love is always a two-way street.  It is a matter of giving and receiving.  This is true even with God.

I love telling everyone about the way God’s love is for us.  I don’t suppose many of you have heard about the Franciscan Blessed John Duns Scotus.  Only recently the late Pope John Paul II beatified him and approved of all his writings.  The Christian Church maintains that God sent His Son into the world to save it from sin and Hell and to lead us to Heaven.  When we believe this, we are saying that it was sin that made God the Father send His Son into our world.  Duns Scotus has a theory on this matter which I think is absolutely beautiful.  Like all of us he maintained that God is love.  From all eternity God decided He was going to create.  He had to because He is goodness itself and goodness spreads itself.  When you are feeling good, the last thing you do is to go to your bedroom, lock the door and say, “I’m so happy and no one is going to share my happiness.”  That is the last thing you would do.  You want to spread your goodness and happiness and share it with others.  That is what God had to do.  He had to share His goodness with us and so He created.  His main reason for doing this is because He wanted to be loved perfectly in return.  Could any of His creatures do that, could you or I?  Most certainly not, because we are finite creatures, and sad to say, sinful ones.  So, from all eternity He planned that His Son would take to Himself our human nature, and become the Perfect Creature who could return His love.  So, Duns Scotus maintains that even if man had never sinned God our Father would still have sent His Son into our world so that He could be loved perfectly by one of His creatures.  Now we see the richness behind the most well known and most loved words in the Bible, “God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him will have eternal life.”

The prophet Hosea wrote of God, “How can I give you up, Ephraim?  How can I hand you over, Israel?... My heart churns within Me; My sympathy is stirred.”  When we read these words, we can see a tear on God’s cheek and hear His voice cracking.  It is telling us that He not only loves to give, but also to receive love.

Yet the primary direction of true love is outward, not inward.  If we keep that in mind, it can help us distinguish true love from the phoney.  True love is not hard to recognise.  Its first impulse and its highest joy is to give.  When a young man truly loves a young woman, you can always tell.  He gives her respect.  He gives her trust.  He gives her himself.  When parents love their children, you can see it.  They give them security when they are little.  When their children get older, they slowly give them more and more freedom.  They don’t manipulate, control and dominate them.  If you love someone you allow them to be free, to be themselves.  You do not dominate, control and manipulate people and call it love.  Your deeds are a direct contradiction of your words.  One acid test can always tell us if our love is the real thing.  Does it give, or is it concerned with getting?

Lord Jesus, “God so love the world that He gave…”  That is to be our standard.  Of course, we can never love perfectly like God, but we can try.

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