Agape - God's Greatest Gift Of All, Love

Agape LOVE

Today’s collect for the 2nd Sunday after Trinity is all about true LOVE and emphasises its true value: Pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of Love, the true bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whoever lives is counted dead before You.

True Life is all about Love as without that wonderful gift of Love we are effectively dead – strong words but very true.

In some ways a strange way to emphasise the gift of Love in such a negative way, rather – Lord teach us to do everything in the power of Love.

Love as the play said says, is a four-letter word but in the Greek of the New Testament there are several words describing various forms of love, distinguishing brotherly love from sexual love and from love shown in generosity and so on.

But there is no doubt at all which love has the highest place, and it is the one described in the words of Jesus throughout the gospels and reinforced by his disciples as: agape, self - giving love, the love described in our collect.

This word agape was not exactly invented by the Christians, but they gave it a whole new meaning as it was the word to describe the kind of love Jesus showed in dying for us on the cross -'Calvary love', as someone once called it.

• It is the kind of love Christians are to have for each other.

• It is love which demands nothing in return, its love which is totally unconditional and entirely free.

• It is a love which is expressed above all else in giving.

• It is sacrificial love at the expense of self

There are many examples of Sacrificial LOVE -

A young mother was making her way across the hills of South Wales, carrying her tiny baby boy in her arms, when she was overtaken by a blinding blizzard.

She never reached her destination, and when the blizzard had subsided her body was found by searchers beneath a mound of snow.

But they discovered that before her death, she had taken off all her outer clothing and wrapped it about her baby.

When they unwrapped the child, to their surprise and joy, they found he was still alive and well.

She had mounded her body over his and given her life for her child, proving the depths of her love.

Years later that child, David Lloyd George, grew to manhood and became prime minister of Great Britain, and, without doubt, one of Britain’s greatest statesman.

We then have the other end of the spectrum Lust as expressed in Sexual love (which is probably what some people mean when they use the word 'love') says, 'I love you and I want you and I'm going to have you.'

But Agape love says - as the couple do in the Marriage Service, ‘All that I am I give to you, and all that I have I share with you.'

The two attitudes are, frankly, poles apart. Without agape-love, sexual love can become selfish, demanding and even exploitative.

But with Agape, sexual love becomes a thing of beauty and self-giving love just as God intends it to be.

Jesus said that the greatest love involves self- sacrifice. 'Greater love has no-one than this, that they lay down their life for their friends..' And few of us would dispute that.

Probably the real and final test of love is how far we would go to demonstrate it, and it is impossible to go further than laying down our life.

In his example, Jesus spoke of doing that for a 'friend'-someone for whom we have affection.

But the remarkable thing about the love demonstrated by Jesus, of course, is that He went much further than that. 'God so loved the world that he gave his Son.'

And the 'world' as it was then is the same world today that still opposes God, a society organized as though God didn't exist - the world that rejected Jesus and crucified him.

God so loved the world, so much that He gave His Son for its salvation.

St Paul puts it even more starkly: 'While we were still sinners, Christ died for us' (Rom 5:8).

In this way, Paul argues, that God, demonstrates His own love for us: ‘One will hardly die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person one will dare even to die.’

Perhaps that is comparable to laying down one's life for a 'friend'.

St Paul teaches us a lot about love, especially in his first letter to the Church in Corinth, chapter 13.

A passage which has earned the nickname - The Hymn of Love.

If I speak in the tongues[a] of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.