1 John 4:7-16

Beloved of God,

Yesterday, as Randy’s choice of hymn reminded us, was Trinity Sunday. This evening’s Bible passages prompt us to meditate on the link between the love of God and the doctrine of the Trinity:

⁷ Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. ⁸ Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. ⁹ In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. ¹⁰ In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. ¹¹ Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. ¹² No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. ¹³ By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. ¹⁴ And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. ¹⁵ Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. ¹⁶ So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. (1 John 4:7-16) 

¹⁸ And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. ¹⁹ Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, ²⁰ teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matt. 28:18-20)

The doctrine of the Trinity is too often set aside as something we’re required to believe but can’t be expected to understand. It gets a lot easier to appreciate if we approach it not as a mathematical conundrum or a high-falutin’ theological puzzle, but as a necessary condition of being able to say with John, “God is love.

John uses a noun not an adjective. God isn’t merely loving; God is love. Love isn’t an attribute of God, like “eternal”; it’s who God is. God didn’t become love after a fit of cosmic loneliness compelled him to create other beings capable of being loved; love circulated within God from all eternity. The love of God was never a narcissistic, self-centered love; it was and is always a genuine love for others. Nor was the love of God a mutually self-absorbed love between just two persons; even before creation, the love of God was already and had always been a love for others. This plurality was never a cause of conflict. Divine love is perfect: it unites, it doesn’t divide. The God who is love is one God. The doctrine of the Trinity is another way of saying “God is love.”

In his letter, John twice affirms that “God is love” (vv. 7, 16). As he does so, he can’t help mentioning all three divine persons: Father, Son, and Spirit (vv. 13-14). He does this not to establish a complicated doctrine for theologians to wrestle over, but to show that the God who loves the world is not sometimes “loving” (and sometimes not) but eternally “love.” The Triune God welcomes humanity into the steadfast love that is at the very heart of God. John urges those of us who know that we are loved by God to bear witness to God by loving others.

Which brings us to the Great Commission. When Jesus commissions the apostles—and the worldwide church that they will establish—to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 28:19), he’s not insisting on the use of a doctrinal formula that all will be required to believe but few will understand. If I’m understanding this correctly, Jesus is requiring that the church’s testimony to the world be an expression of the love that underlies all things, both the eternal love within the Trinity and the love of the Triune God for the world. We are not baptized in the name of a doctrine, but in the name of the Triune God who is love.

It is to this love that Christians are called to bear witness in word and deed. On the night of the Last Supper, Jesus had told the disciples, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (Jn. 13:34-35). Jesus also prayed for “those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (Jn. 17:20-21). The church is called to be an image of the Triune God who is love. The words with which we are baptized commit us irrevocably to this inclusive love.

Too often we fail. Which brings us back to the redeeming love of God: “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (vv. 9-10). May the Spirit console us in our failures, reminding us yet again of God’s unwavering love for us in Christ. May the same Spirit cultivate in us, more and more, a love for others that bears faithful witness to the Triune God who is love.

Your brother in Christ,

Max