Two opposing realities strike me more and more all the time: one, the depth and extent of human sin, evil and misery; the other, the pervasive and persistent desire of humans to love and to be loved. The terrible yet hopeful fact though, is that these two, our sin and misery and our need to love and be loved, are completely wrapped up in each other. You cannot look into any human wrong without discovering love frustrated because it is undeveloped, untrained, unsure or weak, perverted, misapplied. And this is true of each of us as individuals as well as the whole of mankind.

           The Gospel today is of course, all about love, about the standard and measure of our love, about how the disease and deficiency of our love is to be cured and transformed:

           Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you... love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.

           The standard of our love is the love of God, our Father who creates and preserves and redeems us out of sheer generosity and loving kindness. He makes the sun shine and the rain to fall on both the just and unjust, the perfect and the sinners. Thus we are to love as he does: that is, to love our enemies, doing good to those who hate us. That is what God does who gave his Son to suffer and die for sinners. These sinners showed how they hated God by the cruel murder of his Son, yet through that death God saved them. That perfect degree of love that moves God our Father is not just something nice to be vaguely wished for. Our eternal destiny, and how we are to be judged depends upon it. If we love as God loves, our reward shall be great and we will become the children of the Most High. If we do not learn this love, we will be lost. Learning to love as God loves, then is the whole meaning and purpose of life. Unless and until we learn this love, we are destruction and misery to ourselves, to each other, and to the world.

           The Christian religion teaches us that the perfect love of God must be what moves us if we are not to be lost eternally. It also teaches us what we experience every day if we were to stop and think about it: that although we long to be loved by such a love, and to love with such a love, we are not capable of this love. Our longing for God’s perfect love is with us as a memory from that state of perfection from which we have fallen, and our inability to attain it by ourselves is the result of our sinful natures. We ourselves are responsible for this incapacity and are therefore subject to God’s judgement; because we are no longer able to regain that power and freedom of love which we lost. Now, for us to relearn to love properly we must be altogether transformed by the true love of God. We must die and be born again.

           New life and true love which comes to us by sharing in the death and resurrection of Jesus, being transformed by partaking of the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, this is the whole meaning and purpose of our religion. Saint Paul reminds us: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.... So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”

           Jesus presents us with the standard of love, the love by which the Father makes, preserves, and redeems the world. He tells us that our place at the final judgement depends upon our being in this love and loving others and ourselves by it. Then He offers himself as the means by which we can enter and receive this love of God. Jesus is the means by which we learn to love as God loves us. That is why our whole life must be devoted to feeding upon the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Baptism is the means by which the old, weak, perverted, and frustrated love which is sin is killed, and the way of discovering the strength of that love which is stronger than death, the love of God. Dying and rising again in that love is the purpose fo our being here this morning; it is the meaning of all our religious exercises.

           We all need and long for love. We want to be loved and we want power to love, the power to love properly and to show and give that love. Our lives are devoted to learning this love from God in Jesus Christ. By his gift of himself we have some power to love and we are assured of God’s love for us. Let us endeavour to gain such love in our daily lives. For most people this is a question of turning away from bad habits and false, superficial, erotic, violent, exciting love which destroys the power of the soul for true love. For them, learning love is a matter of discipline, discernment, obedience to good habits. How often do we hear, or even use in our own defence the argument that it is only natural to do this or that, it is only natural to react this way This is a terrible sign of the wickedness of our time. We Christians are called to rise above the natural, our natures, we are to turn away from the natural, our animal desires and habits and turn to the spiritual, those habits and patterns which God wills for us. So, learning love becomes a matter primarily of faithfulness.. Let us pray for forgiveness and the power and grace to be faithful, loving God and each other as he loves us.