God is love – this and every week

This week, our nation has walked across the Rubicon. Abortion will be decriminalised. Assisted suicide will be legalised and provided by the State. Each of these votes serves to unravel the cords that bind society to life, to truth and to love. All people – people made in the image of God – have lost their right to the state’s protection of their life from the womb to their last natural breath. For our first nine months in utero, and in our last ‘six months’, we will no longer share the same protection from intentional killing that, for generations, all of us have lived enjoying and expecting.

It is hard to know where a Christian response to a week like this should begin. But I want to suggest that today we can begin our response by looking up to the God who is love.

‘God is love.’ (1 John 4:8, 16)

God is love. He is not an abstract force. Nor is he a sentimental feeling. The living God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – is love. And in these three short syllables, we are drawn up to marvel in the mystery of the Godhead.

Our eyes are raised to the God who is one yet in whom there is more than mere ‘one-ness’. There is One fount and source of eternal being. And in that One there are also Three: each evermore pouring himself out in love to the glorious other Two.

Even a glimpse of this eternal love should cause us to worship. And our worship does not stay untethered from the everyday moments; our worship is not unconnected from the ward, the clinic, or the bedside. Because this love is not only the very heartbeat of God – it is also woven into the very blueprint of who we are. To be made, and indeed remade, in the image of God is to be made for communion, not isolation; for self-giving, not self-assertion; for love, and not mere autonomy.

We are not atomised choosers, detached and sovereign over our bodies and desires. We are human beings, knit together by the hand of God and woven into an interdependent tapestry of love. From the womb to our final breath, our lives are not our own. They are given, they are received, and they come with a loving purpose.

And love is not private. It is not neutral toward the other. It cannot be reshaped by cultural mood. Love is life-giving. It is covenantal and not contractual. And it does not flinch from the cost of care.

‘Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.’  (1 Corinthians 13:6-8)

We rejoice with the truth that every human being is made in the image of the God who is love. And so, we say clearly: to affirm someone towards ending their life by suicide is not love. To remove the protection of those too small or too frail to defend their value is not compassion. These are not acts of mercy – they are attempts to dissolve the tapestry of love that binds us – and they are signs of a society increasingly untethered from the God who is love.

To continue to believe that God is love is not naïve. It is an unchanging reality. To live this out is a radical act of hope in a world that so often confuses love with autonomy, and mercy with abandonment. And it is deeply needed – because the truth of the Trinity does not stay at a distance. The truth of eternal Divine love must come down to the ward, to the clinic and to the bedside.

It is there – in the presence of pain, vulnerability and fear – that the love of the Triune God often speaks most tenderly. And there we are called to strengthen the tapestry of love which binds us.

Over a century ago the then Bishop of Durham, Handley Moule preached on the words ‘God is love’ to a congregation raising money for Addenbrooke’s Hospital. After opening with the mystery and majesty of divine love, he ended with a challenge that echoes down to us today:

‘We cannot count heart’s sorrow, and soul’s sin and body’s pain “nothing to us who pass by,” if in the least degree we have known and believed the love which Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have poured out on us from the fountain of their own eternally loving Deity.’

If we have known that love, we cannot look away. So, with the people of God down the ages, we must continue to pray, to love, and to speak. Let us pray – at times with lament but always in hope. Let us love – with presence and perseverance. Let us continue to speak with clarity and compassion.

With God’s help, may we live as those who truly believe that God is love. And we may be assured: that ‘love never fails.’