Palm Sunday – Love

Contrary to the expectations of many, Christianity is a significant force in the public life and global affairs of our times. But its meaning is contested, as it has always been. Earlier this year we saw an extraordinary argument about the nature of Christian love playing out on social media between the Vice President of the United States and the British podcaster and former politician Rory Stewart. A surprising array of people weighed in to share their views in this unlikely theological debate. Even Pope Francis, in his declining health, was prompted to intervene.

The Vice President, J D Vance, took up a theme from the writings of St Thomas Aquinas, the ordo amoris – Order of Love – to defend the American government’s isolationist and anti-immigrant policies. “We should love our family first,” he argued, “then our neighbours, then love our community, then our country, and only then consider the interests of the rest of the world.” In other words, there is a natural hierarchy of love, and that is affirmed in Christian teaching.

Rory Stewart, showing an unusual level of Christian education for British society today, responded by arguing that what was so radical about Christian love, as it entered the hierarchical and socially stratified world of the Roman Empire, was that it challenged and subverted all these natural instincts. Jesus commands us to love our enemies and to receive the hospitality of the despised Samaritan. He also says some decidedly unsettling things about letting go of immediate ties to family in order to be a disciple.

Pope Francis appeared to come down closer to Rory Stewart. He wrote:

“Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. The true ordo amoris… is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan,’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

It’s a temptation recurrent through Christian history to think of the Gospel as a system, a structure that we can impose on the world, and which will bring a reassuring tidiness to our lives. For years I studied an academic discipline called “systematic theology”, a potential Tower of Babel if ever there was one. The modern world loves to systematise and categorise into mental concepts, but the truths that radiate to us from the scriptures and that are encountered in the worship of the Church are not so easily pinned down.

Learning is certainly an important dimension of Christian life. But it’s not by mastering an intellectual system that we are changed from glory to glory, into the image of Christ.

Pope Francis is far wiser in speaking of Christian understanding as being gained through meditation. We become better Christians, not through firmer grasp of the ideas, but through allowing the truth to grow within us. And that prompts us to think much more about our patterns of prayer, silence, and worship. Christian love is not a system of any kind; it is a fruit that grows – so the First Epistle of John famously says – as we live in God and God lives in us.

Love is the first of the nine fruits of the Spirit that we find in the Letter to the Galatians. It is followed by joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. We’re going to be reflecting on these fruits of the Spirit as we gather day by day in the Minster this Holy Week. They will help us think of Christianity less as a system and more as a formation in the ways of God and a growing into the fullness of humanity that has been revealed in this captivating but puzzling figure who rides into Jerusalem on a donkey on this Palm Sunday.

Love is the first of the fruits because love is the destination and the meaning of all that takes place in the gospels and culminates in the Passion story. It is love that comes to Jerusalem in the name of the Lord, love that is rejected and imprisoned, love that offers itself for our redemption on the cross, love that banishes the order of death to establish its ordo amoris as the self-giving energy by which we are to live in harmony with one another and with the earth.

So come to church as much as you can this week, not to learn more, not to have a better grasp of the Christian system, but to grow. Grow in all the fruits that the Spirit cultivates in the soil of a heart turned to God. But grow most of all in love, fruit of the seed that St John, in the twelfth chapter of his Gospel, tells us must die in order to bear much fruit.

This is the love that today’s fractured and frightening world needs, perhaps more than it has ever needed it. So let us stop seeing Christianity as a system, a set of ideas, and let us allow it to grow in us, that we may bear fruit from the seed that dies.