God and the language of love

The most painful condition of the human heart is to be homeless, not simply because it is to be without a roof over your head, but because it is tantamount to being loveless. Cliché it may be but it is nonetheless true that your home is where your heart is. In the Old Testament, there is no more potent symbol of security, stability, peace and belonging – home, in other words – than the vine. Along with olive trees, vines, if given sufficient space, put down deep and wide roots, but they require time and settled conditions to mature. If tended with care, both yield vitally enriching and civilising fruits, staples of both physical and psychic well-being: wine, “which rejoiceth the heart”, as the psalmist says, and olive oil, balm for both the inner and outer body.

So central to civilised existence and so richly symbolic of peace and safety were the vine and the olive tree that their destruction was nothing short of catastrophic. If you wanted successfully to lay siege to a city, you first demoralised its citizens by destroying their vines and olive groves. In time Israel itself, God’s chosen people, came to be referred to as the vine of God. The psalmist speaks of their liberation from slavery as God bringing a vine out of Egypt. Equally, the destruction of vines became a poignant image for national calamity: the same psalm speaks of a boar ravaging the vineyard of the Lord. (The Medici Pope, Leo X, had this image in mind for the Church when, in 1520, he issued his bull, Exsurge Domine, condemning Martin Luther: “Arise, Lord…for foxes have arisen seeking to destroy the vineyard whose winepress you alone have trod…The wild boar from the forest seeks to destroy it.”) All these images of security and belonging come together in the simile used in this gospel, where Jesus speaks of himself as the vine. No one who heard or first read this would have failed to understand that he was pointing to himself as the fulfilment of God’s promise to give Israel a home: he himself, rather than a geographical location, was the Promised Land, the place where the human heart finds rest. “Come to me all you who are weary and burdened…and you will find rest for your souls”, as St Matthew’s gospel has it.

But Jesus amplifies the image of the vine by suggesting that if he is the vine, then we are its branches; and, as such, we share the same life, which we draw from the same source. The converse is also true: cut off from the vine, we wither. And John renders the point even more explicit by using ten times in the space of six verses a richly evocative Greek word meaning ‘to abide’ or ‘to dwell’ or, even better, following the original Jerusalem Bible translation, ‘to make a home’. “Make your home in me, as I make mine in you”. What’s astonishing about how he draws out the implications of this imagery is the emphasis his choice of words places on reciprocity: God makes his home in us. The relationship is mutual, between equals, which is, according to Aristotle and Aquinas, a precondition of friendship. Later in this same discourse, Jesus is explicit: ‘I call you friends, not servants.’ This indwelling, this life and home sharing, is the reciprocity of friendship.

Our love for God, then, and his love for us is the mutual love of friends, not the slavish ‘love’ of subordinates or the condescending ‘love’ of the master. God delights in and loves us because he sees what is loveable in us; and we delight in and love him because we are drawn to and attracted by what is infinitely loveable in him, seeing in him not only the source of our existence, but the ground of our hope and the fulfilment of all that we desire. We love God, in other words, because we are attracted to him by our innate desire for truth, goodness, and beauty. Being himself Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, he is desirable above all else. This is why, long before the sublime mystical poetry of St John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, many of the early Fathers of the Church freely employed the language of passionate love to describe God’s desirability. St Gregory the Great, for instance, says that “We are led to God by desire, drawn to him as if pulled by a rope.”

His writings are filled with wonderfully earthy and earthing images, expressing our desire for God: a lover who yearns for yet another kiss; a person with a sweet tooth, who longs for more of the same; the dizziness experienced standing at the edge of a precipice. He says that “all those in whom the desire for God is deeply embedded, never cease yearning for more. Every delight in God becomes kindling for still more ardent desire.” He was commenting, unsurprisingly, on the Songs of Songs. St Augustine of Hippo, who knew more than most from personal experience the power of human attraction, gives exquisite expression to the sense of God’s ineffable, overwhelming, irresistible beauty. In a sermon on Psalm 45, he speaks of Christ’s life in terms of his beauty. Christ is beautiful in heaven; beautiful on earth; beautiful in the womb; beautiful in his mother’s arms; beautiful in his miracles; beautiful under the scourge; beautiful when inviting to life…beautiful when laying down his own life; beautiful in taking it up again; beautiful on the cross; beautiful in the tomb; beautiful in heaven.

Odd as it may sound, we should be wary of overly ‘spiritualising’ our love for God. We love God in the attractiveness of other human beings, especially in those who love him, whose lives are grounded in him, in whom his beauty can be seen best. Above all, we see, know and love God in Christ, our fellow human being who is God. And we love God with our whole selves, as in the words of psalm 62: O God, you are my God, for you I long, For you my soul is thirsting. Even my body pines for you, Like a dry, weary land without water. We love him with our whole selves because we find in him the fulfilment of all our yearning, in both body and soul, and the fulfilment of every conceivable desire, but none more than our desire for happiness, which is, even if we do not know it, the desire for God. As St Augustine says in a homily on John’s gospel: “When God is all in all, no desire will be left unfulfilled.”