First Love Never Ever Dies

L

et me begin with a simple story. My 5-year-old niece has this habit of turning every question into a little investigation. Ask her anything, and she’ll always answer with: “Why?”

One day, my sister asked her, “Do you miss me?” She quickly replied, “Why?” My sister said, “Because I miss you.” “Why do you miss me?” she asked again. Then, almost as if she knew the answer all along, she said, “Is it because you love me?” When she heard “yes,” she stopped asking. She had reached the only answer her heart was waiting for.

That, my friends, is the truth: love is the foundation of everything. As St Bernard of Clairvaux once said, “Love is sufficient of itself, it gives pleasure by itself and because of itself. It is its own merit, its own reward. Love looks for no cause outside itself, no effect beyond itself” (From a sermon of St Bernard of Clairvaux).

First Point: The Origin of Love

Where does this love come from? Pope Francis’ latest encyclical gives us the answer in its very title: Dilexit Nos—“He loved us.” All forms of love—every action, every movement of creation—are but a response, a footnote to God having loved first.

The Greeks had a name for this divine love: agapē, selfless and unconditional. It is the word Jesus used when he asked Peter, “Do you love me?” As Pope Benedict said, "it seeks the good of the beloved: it becomes renunciation and it is ready, and even willing, for sacrifice" (DC 6). This is love at its deepest, the love that makes God vulnerable, willing to stoop down to us.

Second Point: Peter’s Response

But notice Peter’s reply. Each time Jesus asked, “Do you love me?”—using agapē—Peter answered with a different word: phileō, the love of friendship. And finally, Jesus himself came down to Peter’s level: “Do you phileō me?” In that moment, the divine met the human. God stooped down, showing us that even our imperfect and wounded love, our friendship love, is enough for him to work with. Yes even egoistic love, you name it. There is no place that his Agapē, "descending, oblative love," (DC 7) could not reach.

Let me quote at length Dilexit Nos:

Often, our sufferings have to do with our own wounded ego. The humility of the heart of Christ points us towards the path of abasement. God chose to come to us in condescension and littleness. The Old Testament had already shown us, with a variety of metaphors, a God who enters into the heart of history and allows himself to be rejected by his people. Christ’s love was shown amid the daily life of his people, begging, as it were, for a response, as if asking permission to manifest his glory. Yet “perhaps only once did the Lord Jesus refer to his own heart, in his own words. And he stresses this sole feature: ‘gentleness and lowliness’, as if to say that only in this way does he wish to win us to himself.” When he said, “Learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart” (Mt 11:29), he showed us that “to make himself known, he needs our littleness, our self-abasement” (DN 202).

Third Point: Phileō and Agapē Together

And here is the lesson that time and again Pope Francis would emphasize. He once said that tenderness or gentleness is not weakness. In the same fashion phileō is not less than agapē. In his book “Four Loves,” CS Lewis called friendship “the least natural of loves,” because humanity doesn’t need it to survive. Yet precisely for that reason, it is also of divine origin, not merely instinct or predisposed desire to have. It is the “next best thing,” almost as good as what one most desires. When Martha and Mary told Jesus, “The one whom you love is sick,” and when the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” the word used for love was phileō. Even friendship love is divine when it comes from Christ. As Pope Benedict reminds us, God’s love embraces both eros and agapē. So too with phileō. The friendship of Jesus is never separate from the self-giving love of God. His phileō is always, at the same time, agapē.

So perhaps my little niece had it right all along. Behind all our “why’s,” there is only one answer that satisfies: because of love. God loved us first. And every love we give—whether divine, sacrificial agapē or possessive love eros or simple friendship phileō—is already caught up in that first love which never ever dies. Amen. Fr JM Manzano SJ