How Much Does God Love Us?

While giving a retreat one day to a Confirmation Class, in Antrim, Ireland, a priest put a leading question to them ‘How much does God love us? This much, maybe…’ and  he opened my hands until they were about shoulder-width apart. ‘No! – more!’ they chorused. The hands went wider, and again the same answer. At last the hands were outstretched as if on the Cross, and they answered ‘Yes, that much!’ As he stood there with the hands still outstretched, one girl over on his left spoke up: ‘But you can’t even begin to describe how much God loves us!’   They were all stunned into a silence, with the wisdom and truth of what she had just said- ‘you can’t even begin to describe how much God loves us!’

If I had just one verse of the Scriptures to take with me to a desert island, it very probably would be John 15:9, ‘As my Father has loved me, so I have loved you!’, but more like this: ‘The way my Father has loved me, that is how much I have loved you!’  ‘As much as my Father loves me and has always loved me, that is just how much I have loved you, and have loved all of you!’,- that is, with a love that has no limits at all. When we ponder and contemplate the first part, and wonder at just how much the Father loves His Son Jesus from all eternity,- as the awesomeness of this fills us, then we hear what Jesus is saying to us in the second half, about his relationship with us,- one of love without limits, like the Father’s.  And then he says: ‘Live in my love’,- or ‘Abide in my love’, or ‘Make your home in my love’,-  or maybe, like a fish in the sea, we swim in the ocean of God’s love that knows no shores nor horizons. 

And then, as we awaken to ‘as I have loved you’, in all its depth and width and height and length, he tells us to ‘love one another’ with the same depth and width and height and length.  And to help us to do this, he says (in the same chapter) ‘make your home in me as I make mine in you’. What a relationship, what an intimacy! He invites us to live in each other.

Love is a word which is often over used and misused in modern western culture. God’s love is unconditional love, Divine Love is only possible in a person who has been baptized with water and the Holy Spirit. A soul that is maintaining its ability to love with agape love is a soul that remains in the state of grace. Jesus tells us, “If you love me, keep my Commandments”. We cannot say we love God and continue to walk in the darkness of sin. And should we confess our sin, we must wish with all our hearts never to commit such sins again--this is true repentance and contrition. 

Jesus truly demonstrated his love for us in the cruel agony he suffering in the garden, in the betrayal of Judas, in the Scourging at the Pillar, in his carrying of his Cross, in his crucifixion and death. For God, who is the greatest lover, so loved the world so that the greatest number (that whosoever believes in him which is the greatest invitation) shall have ever lasting life, the greatest gift. What are we willing to do do manifest our love to Him?

 ‘I am alive, or rather it is not I who am alive, but it is Christ who is alive in me! I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.’ (St. Paul, to the Galatian disciples, in Galatians 2:20)

--Rev. Deacon Mr. Joseph Pasquella