The title evokes an expression of the Letter to the Romans, where St. Paul, writing the address of his message, turns directly to the addressee, “To you all, God’s beloved in Rome, called to be his holy people, grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom 1,7).

Like all those from antiquity, the Paoline Letters open with the name of the sender, the addressee and the initial wishing salutation. These three elements are easily found in the prologue of our text (Rom 1, 1-7). In mentioning the addressees of his letter, St. Paul attributes two qualifications to them: “loved by God” and “called to be His holy people”. In the previous verse, after evoking them with a simple personal pronoun («you»), he qualifies them as   «called by Jesus Christ»:this means that it is not only the Apostle to be chosen by Christ, but that also the addressee of his Letter had received a similar vocation through grace, thus they, too, belong to the Lord Jesus in a special way. Thus, St. Paul specifies his addressees: “…all God’s beloved in Rome”, since surely he did not have in mind to write to the whole population in the capital of the empire, but to the Christian community, identified with relevant theological expressions.  

Therefore, the addressee of St. Paul are the beloved children, namely those called by God to form the new Israel, the people that God has loved in a special way (See Deuteronomy 7, 7 – 8) and that, in force of the Covenant, partakes in his very holiness (See Exodus 19, 6). The appellative “holy people”, a special prerogative  of the Christians in Jerusalem (See Acts 9, 13), is extended also to the members of the community in Rome, who share the same vocation. We shall linger our attention on the unfathomable mystery of God’s love. 

You, I and we are loved by God

We are loved by God: this is the good news, the beautiful news which the Apostle communicates to us. If we are loved by God, it is because God is love, he is a Father who loves all and each of us: freely, gratuitously, irreversibly. Love, in the Christian dictionary, is a bi-language word, divine-human: see under the voice ‘Jesus Christ’, divine love for man, human love for God. Is this not stated by every religion, every theology, rather by all the philosophies on God? Also Aristotle effectively called I love –the great unmovable motor of the universe, who “moves everything because it is loved”- however, he meant a love that must be loved, but never, absolutely never could this Love “stoop down” to love all that is not God: if it were so, according to Aristotle, God would finish by losing his divinity, by destroying himself.

Therefore, God can love only himself: He is the love of love. We must love, but he –is he truly ‘he’?- can love nobody else except himself. We spontaneously ask: Does this ‘self loving love’ not run the risk of flowing into the most morbose narcissism? Isn’t the God of Muhammad, the prophet, like this? Every  believer invokes Him thrice a day, with the first ‘sura’ of the Koran,  «In the name of God, Merciful and full of Compassion». Allah has hundred names: Great, Omnipotent, Eternal, Immense, etc., but the nucleus of his attributes is constituted by the two adjectives: Merciful and Compassionate. Allah pours his most clement mercy on all his creatures, even the least and humblest ones. A Muslim saying recites that «God can see a black ant, on a black stone, in the black night, and loves it». Can we speak of a love relation between God and us? Surely, on our behalf, it is more correct to speak not of love, but of ‘submission’: this is what the Arabic word Islam means.

What from his behalf? If we make the comparison with the God of Jesus Christ, two evidences are relevant out of all the others: Allah loves only his “faithful”, and he predestines the unfaithful to eternal damnation; the Father of Jesus, instead, does not make differences among persons, but wants all men to be saved. Moreover, Allah lacks the capacity of loving in a human way. We can understand why: only an incarnated God  can love in a human way, and this is absurd for the Islamic religion. However, how can God love men truly without loving them in an effectively human way? Yet, how can God love us in a human way without a heart made of flesh, truly human? This does not mean that we must think of Incarnation as an event “due” to us: the Incarnation is and remains a grace, an absolutely gratuitous event, totally unforeseeable and unplanned, but the Christian difference is given by faith in that event,  «the Word of God is made flesh», which is the same as to say: the Love of God has assumed a heart of flesh. 

A confrontation with Buddhism is also interesting. H. de Lubac has been the first man to establish an audacious parallel between Christ and Buddha. This is his conclusion, «The failure of this immense adventure, the shipwrecked event of this gigantic “raft”, which has embarked half humanity for liberation, derives from the fact that Buddha has not been able to discover the face of God-Love. We are not severe with him for this reason. Perhaps more than any other man Buddha has been able to interpret the problem of the human destiny. More than any other he has been able to take to a good end a  pars purificans, for which the Christians themselves can be grateful to him. He avoided the deceitful and always tempting ways of superstition, as well as the mechanical ascesis of the gnosis. He has seen the need of a spiritual self-emptying, beyond the death of the senses. However he has, undoubtedly, missed his scope. Without the full capacity of charity, nobody will ever realise the “void” of the detachment. Without the “yes”, which can be only a response, it is not possible to pronounce definitively the indispensable “no”.  (Aspects of Buddhism,  Jaca Book, Milan 1980, 43).

The seven notes of Love

In the last lines of the passage from de Lubac, which we have just quoted, we find the essence of Christianity, the DNA of the Christian vocation: they are the original characterising attributes of the God of Jesus Christ; they are the seven “notes” of love at the origin of every call. First of all  the prevention, the absolute precedence: the beginning of all things, of every history, of every vocation is Love, «It is not we who loved God, but God loved us and sent us his Son…and loved us first”» (1 John 4,10.19). It is God that called Abraham, chose Israel, preferred David to his brothers; the motive is never to be found in the chosen person or in the chosen people; in fact Israel is the least out of all peoples (Deuteronomy 7, 7 and following) and David is the least out of the children of Jesse. “Consider your vocation”, Paul exhorts his Christians in Corinth: not many of you are wise by human standards, not may influential, not many from noble families.. God prefers what is foolish, what is weak, what is ignoble, what is nothing (1 Cor 1, 26…).

The prevention expresses itself in gratuity: God calls man because he loves him, and loves him because He is Love, not because man is lovable. Could the sun not illumine and the fire not burn? He who contemplates the Crucifix discovers such a gratuitous and boundless love as to feel it impossible: this is how God has loved the world! Having loved his own, Jesus loved them up to the end. This is truly an exceeding charity: immeasurable, disproportioned!   

Gratuity consolidates in faithfulness: the promise is kept, love, once given, is given for good. Faithfulness is not a tired and irksome habit: the love of God is not repeated, it is renewed. Calvary is not an extinguished volcano.  Christ never repents of his calls, not even of calling Jude.

Faithfulness is translated into tenderness: it does not become hard because of the obstinate will of self-coherence and does not cool down in its formal corrected-ness, but is given in warm gestures of the most careful and affectionate delicacy: is there anything more tender than Christ who stoops down to wash the feet of his disciples? The “called” one must expose himself to the love of the Master and must allow himself to be loved: it is He who is first to love!

Tenderness flows into concreteness: love becomes gesture and history, it does not entrust itself to empty words or sweetish attitudes, but reaches the called one in his un-repeatable person, in the singularity of his situation, in the entirety of his relations with other men and with the world.

Concreteness flows to mercy: Love is truly concrete, because it does not judge or condemn. It excuses everything, bears everything. It does not remain inactive before the misery of the beloved, does not win only the time, but wins a more relentless enemy: the fault, non-correspondence, unfaithfulness.

Mercy is declined in  -it is a scandal- jealousy: it never ends in a very good airy or morbose sentimentalism. The love of Go is jealous, not in the sense that he is envious of our happiness –this is rather the sentiment that gnaws Satan eternally- as in the sense that he  cares, like the motherly love, for the well-being of his creatures  This is why his love is demanding: he gives up himself totally and asks our total being- heart and life- otherwise the adult character of love would be at loss, as well as the seriousness of the response, the respect for one’s dignity.  

The fundamental laws of Love

They are four in particular. The first one could be called the law of verticality. Many times we are warned against the danger of horizontalism: Christianity –they say- cannot be reduced to the commandment of love for our neighbours, and this is right: the commandment of love for God comes first. However, the event comes before the first commandment: God has loved us first! Therefore, the vertical dimension precedes and founds the horizontal dimension, though it is the matter of a descending verticality: it is not we that take the initiative of ascending to God, but it is God who comes down to us. The Christian vocation is a gift that comes from above: as we are born from above, not from flesh and blood, but from water and the Spirit, similarly at the origin of every vocation there is God the Father who loves and calls us. Just as no man can generate himself, similarly no man can call himself.  

The second law, strictly connected with the previous one, could be defined as the law of the indicative. In the Christian life, the indicative precedes the imperative: you are loved, therefore you shall love! Faith founds charity; the call precedes the answer; the kerygma generates the ethics. This was said by a master of suspicion, but this is truly superior to every suspicion; «We need to know love, before ethics; otherwise there is torment» (J.-P. Sartre).

The third law can be formulated in these terms: God chooses a people (Israel), but he does it to bring all peoples to light. He chooses a person, but for the salvation of the people of God. In fact, his love is an elective love, but not selective, discriminating, because love can never make preference of persons. The called man is placed before his responsibility: he must know and remember always that God has chosen him as an instrument of salvation for “many”. If a called man forgot to be a simple instrument –absolutely unfit and inadequate- and pretended to be the cause and protagonist of his own salvation and that of others, he would finish by destroying every possibility of authentic self-realisation and of true grace for others. 

The fourth law of Love is the cross: as for Christ, similarly for every Christian, to answer the call of the Father means choosing to give up life for the sake of love. We cannot follow the via crucis, if we are not sincerely, concretely and definitively available to deny our “I” and to nail it to the cross, otherwise, sooner or later, we shall finish by nailing somebody else to it.

Do we believe that we are loved?

A datus, which is abundantly proved by experience and acknowledged by modern psychology, tells us that a child who has not received affection, will find it difficult, when it grows up, to express its affection towards others. Did you, when you were a child, feel the need of “conquering” the love, the appreciation and the trust of your parents, your teachers and friends? The criterion of God’s love is not is our goodness, but our poverty; it is not our merit, it is our need: God loves us unconditionally and gratuitously. As a Pharisee, Paul thought of having to merit the love of God, but later he discovered the love in Jesus Christ and shouted,  «He loved me and gave himself for me» (Gal 2,20). Have there been moments in my life in which I have felt loved by God the Father, without any merit of mine, notwithstanding, rather just because of my sin? Now, do I feel enveloped by the thoughtful and tender love of God?

Whatever my past has been, God has always been with me. Whatever my present is, God is with me. Whatever the future will be, God will always be with me. Am I able to overcome the regret of the past with a sincere attitude of gratefulness? Do I try to overcome the fear of the future with trust and abandonment in the most tender mercy of the Lord? In front of the unfathomable mystery of God’s love, do I understand the stupor of the Psalmist as he asks himself: What are human beings that you spare a thought for them, or the child of Adam that you care for him?  (cf Sal 8,5).

Francesco Lambiasi
Bishop of Rimini
Via IV November, 35 - 47900 Rimini