The Power of Love

The eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had ordered them. When they all saw him, they worshiped, but they doubted. Then Jesus approached and said to them, “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.” (Matthew 28.16-20)

The task before us today is either very easy or very, very difficult. That’s because the first Sunday after Pentecost is traditionally celebrated as Trinity Sunday, or more appropriately, the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. That it follows on the heels of Pentecost makes some sense in that the disciples received the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, at least according to one of Luke’s versions of the event. Oddly, Luke doesn’t seem bothered by inconsistency. In his gospel, the Spirit is given to the disciples on Easter evening. In his second volume, the Acts, the Spirit is given fifty days after Easter. 

That’s a problem for another day. We have enough on our plate today. As I said, our task is either easy or difficult, depending on which road we take in the woods, as Robert Frost reminds us when he talks about diverging roads. And we are definitely deep in the woods when we talk about the Holy Trinity. The easy approach–one I favor tremendously–is to say that the concept of one God in three persons is a mystery. In other words, unexplainable because it is beyond mere mortal minds to comprehend.

Some of the greatest theological minds, Augustine among them, tended towards the mystery, occasionally overstepping into explanation, as theologians are prone to do. The medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas argued that God transcends every form of complexity and composition familiar to the human intellect. In other words, we can’t comprehend him. 

Centuries later, Karl Rahner, the 20th century German theologian, a favorite of mine, followed in Aquinas’s footsteps and held to the absolute incomprehensibility of God, repeating like a mantra that God is incomprehensible and impenetrable, the holy mystery. Oddly, he then offered an explanation of the Trinity, working backwards from human experience to who God is in his essence.

Truthfully, I think every attempt to explain the Trinity ends up in a full-blown heresy or tiptoeing so close to the line that you can feel the fire from the stake that heretics were burned on. A friend of mine who taught theology for over a decade had for his final exam on his course on the Trinity each student write a sermon that he hypothetically would give on Trinity Sunday. He never told me how well they did, but considering that the confidence level of seminarians is as high as Montezuma’s altar, I suspect they burned to a crisp on said altar. I also wonder how many pulled out Saint Patrick’s three-leaf shamrock and tried to pass it off as their own idea.

So, as I said at the start, we can do it the easy way and stick with the utter mystery of God or we can go the hard route and attempt an explanation of God, doomed as soon as we open our mouths. On this one, I’ll go for the easy way, content to live in the cloud of unknowing, recognizing that anything we say about God is like baby gibberish at best.

I’ve always taken my cue from the writer of the First Letter of John who kept the definition of God at its simplest, writing “God is love.” I say start there, stay there, don’t change a thing. When I tell myself that God is love, the world begins to make sense–kinda, sorta–pieces begin to fall together like a rubik’s cube, and I get this warm feeling from the universe that otherwise would get snuffed out by all the ugliness in the world.

Take, for example, the gospel selection that we have today, coming to us right at the tail end of Matthew’s gospel after the death and resurrection of Jesus. Prior to this part, the Risen Lord has told the women at the tomb to go and tell the disciples to meet him in Galilee, which they do. Hence, the section we hear begins with the line “the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had ordered them.”

For Matthew, this is his one and only post-resurrection appearance to the eleven and it is a brief one. As we hear, he says to them, “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.” This is the end of the gospel, nothing else needing to be said, the “great commission,” as it is called, saying it all.

When I hear it, one word pops off the page for me. It is the word “power.” All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” What in the world does the Risen Lord mean by the word power? After all, he has been nailed to a cross, left to die for hours, and buried in a tomb. As I see it, that doesn’t look anything like “all power on earth has been given to me.” 

So, why would the Risen Lord make the statement? Sometimes, the word is translated as authority, but that falls short. The Greek word wants to convey a force, some sort of capacity. The question then becomes what force does Jesus say he has, a force that is in heaven and that is on earth. Again, we know for a fact it isn’t any kind of military force. He told Pilate he didn’t have any brigade at his beck and call.

The one force that the Risen Lord has both in heaven and on earth is the power of love. It was his capacity for love that has allowed him to suffer and to die a shameful death for sinful humanity. It was the force of love that had him battle the demonic forces whenever and wherever they showed their faces, whether in the leper shunned by polite society, or in the adulteress about to be stoned to death, or in the tax-collector spat upon by everyone because he worked for Caesar. 

Equipped not with sword or saber, but only with love, the Galilean used that power to break the chains of evil, lifting people from the dirt, and giving them a new life, a life to be lived as children of the Most High God whose love embraced them as a mother would the child of her womb. He showed again and again that it was the one power that could overcome the dark forces of the world, rendering them impotent, the demons scurrying off like vultures chased away from a kit rabbit.

So, when the Risen Lord gives the eleven the “great commission” to go and make disciples of all nations, he is telling them to do as he did, to stand up against the darkness in the world and, armed with the same love that fueled his fight, to expose wickedness and wrongdoing for the weaklings that they are, schoolyard bullies brought to their knees by a power they have never seen before, the power of love.

Against all odds, the eleven left the mountain and did as the Lord Jesus had told them, walking into the world without weapons of destruction, armed instead with the unstoppable capacity to love as he loved, a match that the world was not ready for, the wickedness that imprisoned the world slowly but steadily  subdued by the singular force of love.

Certainly, we can be skeptics. Even Matthew says the eleven doubted. But subsequent history shows that the armies of the world are powerless against the force of love. The Roman Empire crumbled beneath the power of love shown by Christians, pagans stunned to silence, only able to say, “See how they love one another.”

Unfortunately, there are times when the power was untapped, when believers did not practice what the Risen Lord had practiced, and time moved backwards again, awaiting disciples who would appear and who had a capacity for love that humbled the proud and that raised the lowly. That capacity, that power has its origins in heaven and has been let loose on the earth through the words and works and wonders of the Lord Jesus.

There is no stopping it. Yes, it can be slowed down when believers turn their back on their commission, but it cannot be stopped because the Most High God cannot stop loving the world, his love flooding the low places and reaching to the high places, seeping into every crook and cranny, bringing to life what was dead. Love is unstoppable because God is unstoppable.

Today, the great commission is given to us by the same Risen Lord, little different than that command that he gave the eleven on the mountain. We are told to go into the world and make disciples, work that is done not by badgering and belittling, but is done by welcoming and loving all whom we meet on the path of life, converting hearts of stone into hearts of flesh by the warmth of our love, the crowds saying of us, as they said of the early Christians, “See the love they have for one another.” 

If the world appears dark–and it does too often–it is only because we have failed to use the power that has been given to us by the Risen Lord, a power unlike any power on earth, a power that does not subjugate others, but raises them up, a power that does not condemn to prison those who do not belong, but opens all the prisons that humanity has built to hide away the dispossessed, the displaced, and the despised.

Often, the theologian Karl Rahner was at his best not when he was talking elegantly about theology, but when he was praying openly from his heart. He once offered this short prayer, saying, “Only in love can I find you, my God, in love the gates of my soul spring open.” That seems to be something we all can understand, a statement so simple and stark that it shakes us to our shoe soles. “Only in love can I find you.”

So, have I said anything about the Triune God on this special day dedicated to the Most Holy Trinity? I’ll let you be the judge of that. This much I agree with Rahner when he said that what we know of God can only come from our experience of God. And my experience of God–Father, Son, and Spirit–is not so much a triangle, but is a circle. A circle of love, much like children on the playground holding hands, dancing around in a circle, giggling to the high heavens. It might not pass a theology exam, but I can live with it.

As I said, the only thing we need to know about God is that God is love. Augustine said as much when he also looked at the First Letter of John and drew from it the same conclusion, “Love God and do whatever you please,” he wrote, “for the soul trained in love to God will do nothing to offend the One who is Beloved.” Makes sense because the power of love will never lead us away from the God of love.

–Jeremy Myers