The Christian revelation in Jesus is that God is a community. A community of perfect love.
The Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – can be likened to a water wheel with three buckets, that perpetually spins and in doing so constantly fills and empties itself with love. An unending giving and receiving of perfect love. This perfect community is eternal relationship, completely self-sufficient – otherwise it would not be God, for God needs nothing outside of Himself (we of course have no precise pronoun to describe God! He – She – It – They, all fall far short of God’s reality). If you think about it, if God’s nature is love, then God could never be just a single ‘person’, devoid of any relationships: God would not be self-sufficient! God must be a community.
The point of these statements is simply that God never needed anything outside of Himself. Not angels, spirits, planets, or… people. Surely that begs the question: why Creation? Indeed, why humanity?
Why do we, and all of our beautiful world and the entire universe, exist? For the simple and humbling fact is that God never needed us to exist. The only possible answer then is that God freely chose to inaugurate and maintain Creation. But that still begs the question: why? After all, Creation – life – entails not just joy but also suffering. And if God is truly love, then He cannot be untouched by Creation’s sufferings, from the death of the smallest worm to the betrayals and evil of mankind.
The only answer must be framed by God’s nature: love. Creation is therefore the overflowing of God’s love. It’s as if the buckets on the water wheel were more than brim full: a superabundance of love. And God decided – a conscious act of His will – to create a multitude of other buckets to join in the eternal circle of love. We, and all of Creation, are born of love. We begin in and through love, we are maintained in and through love, and we will find our eternal destiny in and through love. The divine circle has room for all of us – it is utterly inclusive!
And this love that God has shared with us is not stingy. It is not limited or even just sufficient. It is absolutely superabundant, overflowing, unending. This knowledge, this “good news”, really is too much for us to take in. We cannot ever contain this with our minds, but we can perhaps experience it to some degree with our hearts. Do you know how much you are loved by God? ‘Know’ is perhaps a poor word here – have you ever experienced anything of His great love for you? If religion has any purpose it surely is to bring us to personal and collective experiences of His love for us. Sadly religion can often descend into mind games and tribalisms. There is so much divine love that we don’t need to find our true worth in competition, achievement, self-justification or merit.
So total is His love for us, that it is eternal – never-ending. When God thought of us, you, me, and all of Creation, He took a radical decision, a permanent commitment. He will never revoke His decision – to do so would be a failure of love, a failure of God. And God never fails in what He does.
You, me, and all of Creation are held in an unending embrace of love. Death will not break that embrace. Nothing can separate us from His love. Truly, all will be well.
Eternity will be an inexhaustible and ever-new journey into that great Love.
Martin