The futility Christ delivers us from has something to do with what we briefly discussed today in reference to practicing the spiritual disciplines. The futility of what, for Christians, should be our old way of life, is thinking we must earn whatever it is God has to give us. What delivers us from this futility is experiencing God’s love just as we are and just because we are.
What does God have to give us? Well, the easy answer is grace. What is grace? Grace is nothing other than God sharing divine life with us. Ultimately, what God has to give us is nothing other than God’s self. What is the nature of God’s “self”? Because God is triune, we know grace has something to do with others, that is, with community. Essentially, the life of God- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit- is best- expressed in one word: agape.
We translate agape into English as “love.” This is fine and well, but as with most Western languages, in English, the word “love” has a vast range of meaning. For example, I can say, “I love my wife” and “I love pizza.” Hopefully, I am referring to two things. If not, I probably have issues.
By contrast, koine Greek, the language in which our uniquely Christian scriptures were originally written, has four words for love. Three of these words- philos, eros, and agape- are used in the New Testament. Agape means something like self-giving, self-sacrificing love. As we begin Holy Week with this liturgy of Evening Prayer, it is a good time to think about agape.
Our epistle reading for Mass this Passion Sunday, taken from Year C of the Sunday Lectionary, is the so-called “kenotic hymn” Paul uses in the second chapter of his Letter to the Philippians. You know, the one that begins with: “Though he was in the form of God, Jesus did not deem equality with God something to be grasped” or held onto.1 But neither is his divinity something to merely be relinquished. Rather, he shares it through his self-emptying, which is what kenosis means.
In the fourth chapter of the First Letter of John, twice within the space of eight verses, we hear theos agape estis- God is love.2 It is this understanding of God, shown to us so powerfully by Jesus in passion and death for sure, but most powerfully by his resurrection. It is by his resurrection he rescues us from the futility of our former way of life, even if, maybe especially if, that life has been a distorted Christian one.
Christus resurexit quia Deus caritas est- Christ is risen because God is love. Because of the reality of this life, only someone who has experienced the love of God given us in Christ by the power of their Holy Spirit is able to center her faith and the hope that flowers from it in God. If hope is faith’s flower, kenotic love, agape, is their fruit.
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