We're all connected, by God

Can we admit the love of God still connects us together as Paul did? It’s much easier to extend love with the person eager to see you and consistent in their time with you. I believe it’s because we attach the love of God to our love for others. We know God asks us to extend love for our enemies and that we control that channel of love. It’s just not something we’re very good at. 

The love we extend, though, isn’t just ours. It is God’s love. Withholding love for others is a most insidious thing to do.

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How close are our relationships to God? 

By John Pearring


https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/052221.cfm
Acts 28:16-20, 30-31
John 21:20-25


Our many relationships vary widely and wildly, from distant yet long-lasting friendships all the way to our kin—siblings, cousins, parents, spouse, and offspring. This conglomerate of folks isn’t really a conglomerate at all. They are individual relationships, different in so many ways. The fuel behind these relationships does end up being the same, however. We might think it is family and work and church and coincidence that connects us. That’s not really true. It’s love, isn’t it?  

We might voice some other expression for our friends, yet love does form our companionships. Do you love all of them? Can you really say that? Do they all love you? 

I’d like to think the love motive is more than just accurate. It is endemic, as in “certain.” We may say pal and buddy and cuz and spouse and sis and mom and dad, but consequence and necessity bring us together in a love relationship because love exists. The love is not just because of us, and most often does not involve our love at all.

Love, when hidden and invisible, exists between all of us through divine insistence. Our creator built love into the system of human relationships. Likely, also between all creature relationships. We can try and eradicate love or ignore it, but we rub at it like some unwanted emotion at our own peril. We snub off love’s divine source as a ridiculous notion with ugly consequence. We’ll get to Isaiah’s litany of that result in a bit.

The worst thing we can do about relationships based upon love is to cover up the notion altogether. We remove love’s reminder to focus on our own self-manufactured value system of dislikes and likes, or usefulness and annoyance. Any range of liking or loathing we have for an assigned loved one cannot erase the source of love—God himself. I call our friends and relatives “assigned” because that’s the inference we must assume in a world where God is totally involved.

Unfortunately, the love divinely assigned to us isn’t all flowers and rainbows. Quite often, it can lead to all kinds of injuries and even death. When discovered, we revere the love we have for others. It’s the discovery of love that changes our attitude to everything and opens us to a dynamic relationship with God. I presume the opposite is also true. Eventually, love from and for friends and family registers so profoundly that, with God, it can cut through annoying and perpetual shenanigans and remain in place all the way to high crimes. 

I’m also speaking of loves lost. These are relationships in need of repair from the source of all love. When torn by creeds, decisions, or uncontrollable things like identity politics and misconstrued conclusions, our love relationships can only be broken by God. And probably not in this lifetime. It’s suggested that God breaks off his love from us only at our incredibly stubborn insistence. Some also offer that’s impossible. In either case, God’s love hovers in wait, penetrating our hearts, even over the most severe of breaks. 

Almost all of us have this problem. We may not vocalize the truth that love conquers all. We may not want to consider it is true. We may never get the chance to attend to it. Nonetheless, we should be assured that God’s love tethers all separations through his unrelenting connections to each and every one of us. 

That brings us to Paul in today’s excerpts from Acts. Paul sits in prison due to charges and condemnation from his former friends in faith, the Jerusalem Jews. 

“After trying my case, the Romans wanted to release me because they found nothing against me deserving the death penalty.”

Paul’s legal appeal to the Romans worked in his favor for two years. He is eventually executed. A specifically insidious Jewish leadership continued their pressure until the execution was held. During this time, though, Paul doesn’t abandon the Jews for his new family of Christians, as some might imagine it. Large groups of the gentile population heard and believed his witness of faith. Here’s Paul’s confirmation of his love for the Jewish people through all of this. 

The very people who condemned him had agreed to come and meet with him in Rome. He told them:

“This is the reason, then, I have requested to see you and to speak with you, for it is on account of the hope of Israel that I wear these chains.” 

Some of the Jews then understood his love for them, which he explained as the love of God through him. They joined the Christians as believers. Most did not, and their stubbornness in hatred for Paul led to his death. But something worse than death was happening to them.

We can often tell how close we are to people by the things we report. “He thinks I’m a fool.” “She was so eager to see me.” “She believes I can’t do anything right.” “He calls me every Friday, without fail.” It’s a bit selfish, of course, to review what others think of you. Yet, your take of another’s view is a relatively honest appraisal of how you imagine you are loved or hated. Our estimate may not be correct, but it tells us how we are primed to operate with other people. Our imaginings usually reflect our positions.

Can we admit the love of God still connects us together as Paul did? It’s much easier to extend love with the person eager to see you and consistent in their time with you. I believe it’s because we attach the love of God to our love for others. We know God asks us to extend love for our enemies and that we control that channel of love. It’s just not something we’re very good at. The love we extend, though, isn’t just ours. It is God’s love. Withholding love for others is a most insidious thing to do.

The control of God’s love in our hands, though, doesn’t affect just the ones we cut off. It affects us. The following verses from Paul are spoken to the Jerusalem Jews who visited him. Paul quotes Isaiah.

Without reaching any agreement among themselves, they began to leave; then Paul made one final statement. “Well did the Holy Spirit speak to your ancestors through the prophet Isaiah, saying:

‘Go to this people and say: 
You shall indeed hear but not understand.
You shall indeed look but never see.
Gross is the heart of this people;
they will not hear with their ears;
they have closed their eyes,
so they may not see with their eyes
and hear with their ears
and understand with their heart and be converted,
and I heal them.’ “

I believe this strange set of verses reveals the opposite of what we think it means. That is, it’s not God who shuts us off, but we who shut off each other and, therefore, God. God knows when we are reluctant to love another and hostile to the other’s very existence. Such a position, which is the position of the Jewish leadership to Paul, dramatically affects reality. They will hear Paul’s words, but their hatred for him will not let them understand. They will look at the imprisoned man, at their hands, but not see that they are responsible for it. They insist upon this hardness of heart, as scripture calls such stubbornness, and will therefore not be healed from their hatred.

Here’s where our channeling of God’s love can be assessed. When we say something negative or positive about a person, we should feel the tug of God urging us to be kind. Even as we say, “He’s an idiot,” the blistering paste of such a bumper sticker on someone that God loves will gnaw at our senses. That is unless we refuse to see God’s love. 

Once we recognize that God knows how we treat others, we’re placed in front of God’s love with more intensity. We cannot remove God’s love for another. We can only fool ourselves, thinking we’re covering it up with some other feeling.

The harder we insist upon hatred for another, the thicker our paste builds upon God’s love for others. Yet, we cannot truly disconnect God. We can only grip the pipeline of love and weirdly squeeze it as if we can control its flow. We do, but we’re cutting off the flow of God to us.

Through God, we should love all of the people we encounter. And more than that, everyone we know and meet is a potential channel of God’s love for us. 

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