God is Love

Many of you will be familiar with Julian of Norwich. In May 1373 she received a series of sixteen visions which she recorded in her book, “Revelations of Divine Love.” It is the first known book written by a woman in English. There are two editions, the short one she wrote very soon after her visions, and a longer version she wrote later with her reflections about what she saw.

Her understanding from all her visions is that God is totally and completely love. She writes:
 “Then [God] showed me a small thing, the size of a hazelnut, nestled in the palm of my hand. It was round as a ball. I looked at it with the eyes of my understanding and thought, What can this be? And the answer came to me: It is all that is created. I was amazed that it could continue to exist. It seemed to me to be so little that it was on the verge of dissolving into nothingness. And then these words entered my understanding: It lasts, and will last forever, because God loves it. Everything that is has its being through the love of God.”[1]

It lasts, and will last forever, because God loves it. Everything that is has its being through the love of God.

Today’s gospel reading is about the lengths we will go for something that is precious to us; the shepherd who searches for one lost sheep and the woman who searches for her missing coin and gets her friends together to celebrate when she finds it. Jesus tells these stories to show the Pharisees that God will go to great lengths for one individual sinner and rejoices to be reunited with them.

These parables of God’s love reminded me of Julian’s vision of the hazelnut because they both have the same sense of preciousness. The missing sheep is precious, the missing coin is precious, you and I are precious, and Creation is precious.

The universe is coming into being because of the love of God. Julian said, “It lasts, and will last forever, because God loves it. Everything that is has its being through the love of God.”  We might expand on that a little to say “Everything that is has its being through the essential nature of God.” Because the essential nature of God is Love and Creativity. God cannot NOT love and God cannot NOT create. That is simply who God is.

Creation lasts, and will last forever, because God loves it. Everything that is has its being through the love of God.

Julian lived at a time of plague and famine and was sought after as a counselor for those in distress[2], yet her writings are just what their title says, “Revelations of Divine Love.” She assures us that everything is alright when looked at through the eyes of God’s love. You are probably familiar with her most famous saying, ‘all shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.’

Julian’s visions made her an optimist. The same cannot be said for Jeremiah who gave us our first reading today. We will be hearing from him in the next two weeks as well. Jeremiah’s prophetic ministry covered a tumultuous forty years at the end of the 7th and beginning of the 6th centuries before Christ. He was not a popular prophet as he proclaimed that the nation of Judah would suffer famine, foreign conquest, plunder, and captivity in a land of strangers. He was not popular, but he was right.

Reading the short selection from Jeremiah this morning made me think of Gaza. ‘I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins before the Lord, before his fierce anger.’  (Jer 4:26) When I see pictures of the destruction and the suffering of the people of Gaza, and the West Bank, it makes me weep. And the destruction of the environment. As Jeremiah said,” I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light…I looked, and lo… all the birds of the air had fled.”

So here we have a paradox.

Julian tells us that ‘Creation lasts, and will last forever, because God loves it. Everything that is has its being through the love of God.’ Jeremiah tells us, ‘the earth shall mourn, and the heavens above grow black’ because of people’s sin and the Lord’s fierce anger.

How are we to reconcile these two very different visions of God?

Some people say that the God of the Old Testament is different from the God of the New Testament.

Since Jesus was an educated Jew and the only Scriptures he had were what we now call the Old Testament, I don’t think we can justify just writing off the God of the Hebrew Scriptures. I do think that Jesus taught us to see God very differently. Perhaps Jeremiah was right in seeing the disaster that was headed their way but not so right in declaring that it was due to God’s anger.

Maybe God wasn’t angry but it was the natural outcome of the political situation of the day and the choices that the people made. Just as in Julian’s time famine and plague were the realities of drought and the failure of public health practices due to ignorance.

Maybe God doesn’t want suffering, but suffering happens. And much avoidable suffering happens because of human behavior. We have free will. Not total free will. Our free will is constrained by the circumstances in which we find ourselves. And suffering can happen because of the decisions we make, and suffering can be alleviated by the decisions we make. Decisions we make as individuals, decisions we make as groups, decisions we make as nations. Suffering can be made or alleviated by individual decisions and by decisions made at State and federal levels.

The suffering in Gaza comes as a result of decisions that humans have made over the centuries, some good, some not-so-good and some downright evil. God is present in the suffering and God is working every moment to help humanity make better decisions and to bring the best possible outcome out of every situation. But God’s love allows us to go on using our free will even when we make a mess of it, even when we sin, even when we cause suffering.

God is still creating this ever-expanding universe. And so are we. But God is always creating it in love. Our motives are rarely so pure.

Yet it is our calling, people of God. We are called to expand the reign of God. We are called not just to bask in the amazing love of God shown to us by the shepherd who came and found us, but to live that love in every moment, share that love every which way we can.

Many of Julian’s visions were rather gory images of the crucified Jesus with a lot of blood. Jesus’ death was not pretty, but in that amazing event, God brought together immense love and immense suffering. This is the central mystery of our faith; that God’s love and human suffering were joined together on the cross and then God brought resurrection life out of the midst of it.

None of us understand it. We have glimpses. Julian’s visions were glimpses. Glimpses which led her to say:

God is all that is good. God has created all that is made. God loves all that he has created. And so anyone who, in loving God, loves all his fellow creatures loves all that is. All those who are on the spiritual path contain the whole of creation, and the Creator. That is because God is inside us, and inside God is everything. And so whoever loves God loves all that is.

the Rev. Dr. Caroline Hall
 


[1] Translation by Mirabai Starr, ‘Julain of Norwich; the Showings’

[2] https://julianofnorwich.org/pages/who-is-julian-of-norwich