Canter Bridge

There was a time in the circles of my youth when too much talk of love in connection with ‘the things of God’ was taken as the surest sign that one had ‘gone liberal’. This is a deep shame.

To be sure, people who speak critically in this way have seldom set out to pursue bloody-minded hatred. They are usually quite loving people, particularly with others whose profile is proximate to their own. Their intention is to be faithful stewards of a truth that comes from God. Having observed others merrily casting away sacred things for the sake of happy Groupfeel, they have become incensed and mistakenly fallen back upon a suspicion of love itself.

Jesus would be gracious to such people, I feel sure. Yet he would not cede ground on the centrality of love. The beautiful discourse of the Gospel of John’s seventeenth chapter has Jesus put things this way in conversation with his Father:

Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you have sent me. I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.

In good hebraic expressions, Jesus speaks here of making known his Father’s name. He stands, in his moment, at the mouth of a broad spiritual and literary river wherein the name of YHWH has assumed a core duty in the divine economy. Much more than mere label that distinguishes this deity from some other, the Lord’s name is infused with matters of character. By it he reveals his intensely existing and life-fostering persona. By it the people recite a zikkaron, that is to say, a potent reminder of whom it is that they follow and serve. The name is an anchor that bolts them to the one by whom they are recurrently nourished, rescued, and revived. By it and its inexhaustibly exegete-able ramifications, Israel’s tortured prayers hurl YHWH’s self-identifying syllables back at him, crying for him to act his name in supplications whose ferocity seems somehow not to make Israel unwelcome in the eyes of their verbally assaulted divine Listener.

Now Jesus concentrates the gaze even more tightly, insisting that making his Father’s name known to those who have been his followers—together with unspecified others—is to let them in on the scandalous synonymity between his Father’s character and what we have come to know as love.

Then, in one final clause that somehow fails to shock as deeply as it should, he suggests a scandalous feature of that preternaturally amorous core of his Father’s being: It is communicable. It is available. It is contagious.