Transcript

Love is the heart of how we live out the Christian faith.

Writing to the Christian community at Corinth, Saint Paul emphasized precisely this point.

He wrote, Faith, hope, and love abide, these three.

But the greatest of these is love.

And then he added, Make love your aim.

And in fact, Jesus Himself says in John's Gospel in chapter 13, By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

And a little bit later in John's Gospel, If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.

He who does not love me does not keep my words.

And of course, Jesus gives us a double command to love.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.

Now, the virtue by which we fulfill this double command to love is called charity, or we could simply say it's the virtue of love.

In fact, the word charity comes from the Latin word for love, caritas.

So when we say that charity or love is a theological virtue, we mean that it is a supernatural virtue, and it's supernatural in two important ways; in the way it comes about and in what it empowers us to do.

So, charity comes about as a supernatural gift from above, from God Himself.

God infuses charity into our hearts.

As Saint Paul says at Romans 5:5, God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.

And when we receive this gift of divine charity, we are then made capable of sharing in God's love of Himself.

That is, we begin to love God not only as the one who's the cause of everything that exists, or as the creator who is infinitely above us, a- a being that is beyond us.

Rather, when we receive this gift of love, we begin to love Him as our father.

In other words, we develop a personal relationship of love with God, and that is something that only God can give to us.

We cannot generate friendship with God.

He brings us into friendship with Him.

And this is why the first letter of Saint John says, We love because He first loved us.

In loving us even while we are in sin, separated from Him, God heals and restores us, and He fills us then with His supernatural love, the very love with which we love Him and all those whom He loves.

That is, everyone.

Now, this reveals a profound and important truth to us, one that, as a matter of fact, I love to preach on.

It's a very great theme for meditating on.

God does not love you because you are good.

Very often, of course, we are not good.

We're sinners.

He loves us even when we are sinners.

He loves us not because we are good, but because He is good.

So it is the love of God that makes us good, and the effect of this in us, in our hearts and in our souls, is the virtue of charity or the virtue of love.

That is, God transforms our hearts from the inside so that although we formerly, as sinners, did not love God above all things, when we receive this gift of divine charity, we begin to love God above everything else.

In fact, God changes us.

He changes our hearts so that we become lovers of God, really and truly.

Now, the Christian tradition has long understood this in terms of friendship.

When God speaks His divine truth to us and when He then loves us with His divine love, He communicates something of His own life to us.

He draws us into what He knows and loves; in fact, Himself, as He shares His knowledge and love of Himself with us.

And this is what friends do.

They reveal themselves to each other.

They share their hearts with each other.

They share their life with each other.

They share with each other what they know and love.

And this is what God is doing with us when He gives us the gift of charity or the virtue of love.

He establishes us in friendship with Himself.And He gives us, by the supernatural infusion into our hearts, something that is the basis for being united with God, united with God as we know Him by faith and then love Him in the virtue of charity.

Like faith and hope therefore, charity forms one of the pillars of the Christian life.

In fact, we could say that charity is the most important pillar.

It is the essence of the Christian life, and this is what Saint Paul writes in the First Letter to the Corinthians in Chapter 13, in his famous Hymn to Love: If I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

If I give away all I have and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

So while faith constitutes the beginning of the Christian life, charity supplies its perfection.

You could say its soul, its heart.

Charity informs the act of faith and hope that we make.

It animates them so that we actually reach out in love towards the object of our belief and of our hope.

Charity gives the direction and the ordering of those acts to God above all things.

So the belief that we have in exercising the virtue of faith, this will give way in the next life as it passes over to the vision of what we now believe, the vision of God Himself.

And the expectation that we have in this life, in the virtue of hope, will give way when we reach our heavenly homeland to the enjoyment of what we now anticipate and hope for.

But the friendship that we have with God in charity, this will not pass away.

It will remain, and in fact, it will grow even more intense and more joyful and more wonderful as we pass over from this life to the next life where we will love God perfectly and forever.

So we should be careful to note that the friendship that God establishes us in charity does not make us equals with God.

Even as God draws us into His divine life, we remain creatures.

He remains the Creator.

So as creatures, we're made friends of God.

We still owe various things to God in justice.

We owe Him gratitude, for example, as the source of our existence and well-being.

We owe Him worship, and as friends of God, we owe Him our reverence for His divinity.

So the first three commandments of the Ten Commandments presuppose this truth.

Given that every creature owes worship to God, the First Commandment attempts to ensure that we worship the only true God.

I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

You shall have no other gods before me.

And then the Second Commandment asks that our invocation of God's holy name remains aimed at sacred purposes.

You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.

And then, the Third Commandment specifies the day on which the friends of God render Him worship as members of the church, as members of His people, of His family.

Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.

For the Christian then, friendship with God, obedience to His commands, and worship of His divinity, these are all connected.

And Christ even said as much at the Last Supper.

You are my friends if you do what I command you.

And so Jesus Himself commanded several things at that Last Supper.

Love one another is one thing that He commanded.

And loving is what friends of God do.

And another command is, Do this in memory of me, which the Lord gave in reference to celebrating the Eucharist.

As the sacramental representation of Christ's sacrifice on Calvary and the means by which the risen Lord communicates His life to us, the celebration of the Eucharist is the principal form of Christian worship.

It is for this reason the Church obliges all her members to attend Holy Mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation.

Other forms of worship, including personal prayers of praise, thanksgiving, and petition draw their life from the Eucharist and lead back to it.

So this is a bit like being a member of a family.

That's, I think, a helpful way to think about why we have this obligation to attend Mass on Sundays and holy days.

If there were some special occasion in your family, for example, the birthday of your mother or of your brother, and there were a special family meal planned, and you were to say, Well, you know, actually I want to sleep in and I want to spend the day doing something else, what would that communicate about how important your family life is to the other members of your family?

In fact, you'd be saying that I really prefer to do my own thing first and be a member of the family second.

In fact, to be a Christian means to be a member of God's family.

And part of what it means to be baptized as a Christian is to be deputed to the worship of God, deputed to the worship of God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And that is above all consummated in the liturgy of the Eucharist, in the Mass, where moved by the Holy Spirit, we along with the priest offer the sacrifice of the Son to the Father.

To love God in charity then is to live in friendship with Him, to obey His commandments, and to worship Him in the very way that He gives us to worship Him.

Of course, there's much more to be said about how love works in the Christian life.

So in our next session, we'll talk about how this same virtue of charity is at work in our love of our neighbor.