The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such there is no law.
(Galatians 5: 22-3)
The first fruit of the Holy Spirit listed by Paul is– no surprise here– love.
Jesus sums up the whole Christian life in the two great commandments: love God and love your neighbor (cf. Matthew 22:38-40).
Paul’s “hymn to love” is one of the most beautiful passages in his writings (1 Corinthians 13).
He tells us that if we do not have love, no matter what else we may do or what other gifts we may possess, we have nothing and we gain nothing (v.2).
This is strong language.
Love gets at the heart of the Christian faith.
Yet if ever a word meant almost anything to different people, love is that word.
To understand our faith, we need to know what Jesus and the rest of scripture and tradition have meant by love.
It may seem obvious: doesn’t everyone know what love is?
Well, no.
Because we live downstream from the romantic movement, we tend to view love in only one of its aspects, and, scripturally speaking, not its most important one: how we feel about someone or something.
This is to misunderstand the two great commandments.
Love— charity— is so important because it refers to the inner life of God himself.
The Father loves the Son, the Son loves the Father, and the Holy Spirit is the bond of love between Father and Son, loving them both.
Through baptism, as Paul writes, “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us” (Romans 5:5).
We Christians have been graced with divine life and we are becoming sharers of the divine nature.
As God loves, so we are to love, God expressing his love in and through us.
Love is all-powerful; it will conquer death and lead us to our heavenly destiny.
It is the ruling power of the universe, rooted in the Creator and extending from him through everything he has created.
Let’s remember that God never commands us to have a particular emotion.
He knows that our emotions are not always under our control.
The commands of God are addressed to our wills.
This is true of many scriptural statements that may sound simply emotive.
“Do not be anxious” (Matthew 6:34); “Rejoice in the Lord always” (Philippians 4:4); “Fear the Lord” (Psalm 34:9); “Love your enemies” (Luke 6:27); “Forgive your brother from your heart” (Matthew 18:35); “Hate your lives for my sake” (Luke 14:26).
True, these commands are most effective when they are accompanied by the proper emotion, but they are directed not to our feelings, but to our wills.
We practice God’s love by willing the eternal life of all, and by acting, where appropriate, to help accomplish that good.
Love is expressed by action, by what we do.
The supreme example of love is the road of suffering and death endured and embraced by Jesus, as he emptied himself and gave himself for others.
His emotional state, as he was being beaten, spit upon, tortured, and killed, was not the point.
He loved to the end.
The gift of the Spirit will change our inner being so that we can love the way God loves.
Without his grace, we could never do it.
As we cooperate with his presence in us and do our best to practice self-emptying love, we will find ourselves being transformed.
Paul puts love first because love is always first.
Without love, we are nothing.
With love and through love, we participate in the death-destroying life of God.
Let’s learn to cultivate this fruit of love, brothers; it’s a worthy, life-long task.
Tomorrow, we’ll look at some specific areas where God’s love wants to reign supreme in us.
For today, let’s ask the Lord in prayer for a deeper transformation of genuine love that expresses itself in action.
