The love of Christ - Peter Steele

Once upon a time, when you opened a copy of the Bible, you would find that the text flowed on and on, split up into books and chapters, and discreetly signposted by verses, but not otherwise obviously edited. Nowadays, many editions of the Bible are equipped with all sorts of pointers and highlights, with small print and big print and instructive sub-headings, all of it signalling that The Editors Are Among Us.

This is often well and good, but sometimes, I am afraid, they make a mess of it. Take, for instance, the passage from the Letter to the Romans which is the reading for today. It is the famous one which begins with the words, ‘What [or who] shall separate us from the love of Christ?’, after which St Paul speaks with great confidence and emphasis about the fact that that bond will hold.

The sub-editor of my translation, whoever he or she was, puts above this passage, ‘Indomitable love for Christ’. But this, I think, gets the whole thing wrong. The point is not that we are indomitable lovers—of Christ or, come to that, of anyone else. The point is that he is our indomitable lover.

Does this matter? Yes it does. It is certainly true that we can love God. After all, we are told to do so by Christ our Lord himself, and there is no point in telling us to attempt the impossible—it would at best be a cruel joke, and he is not in that line of business.

But nobody who is not a great fool can doubt, after a while, that our status as people rich in love for God is a frail one. The test of this, we have been told from the beginning, is our readiness and resolution in loving others—and even that strange other, oneself. And much of the time the others, and we ourselves, have pretty slim pickings when it comes to being loved.

People who proclaim themselves as being notable for their love of others are, almost without exception, clowns or charlatans. If they think that the thing can be brought off without a certain amount of personal dying, they are certainly fools or charlatans.

This, though, does not disconcert St Paul—whatever it might do to the sub-editor of my translation. St Paul, after all, is the one who stresses so often what a curious, mottled, frail-from-beginning-to-end lot we are. He knows very well, and he goes on insisting, that the most splendid of us is still scarred—physically perhaps, certainly psychically and spiritually and socially.

And within the terms of his own time, he points to those many forces, within us and beyond us, which play upon us. He knew little or nothing of modern sciences and interpretations of humanity: nothing about genetic inheritance, for instance, nothing about evolutionary tendencies, nothing about a capitalist society or its various challengers.

But he did know that human beings are constantly tempted to think of themselves as either manipulators or pawns in society—which means in practice the hated or the haters—and he did know that at any moment we can wonder whether the cosmos has any more meaning than cold dirt and ashes in space.

And his point is that it is just to us—we the ones who confess our sins at the beginning of each Mass, we the ones who are muddled lovers at best—just to us that the loving Christ comes.

This is signalled to us each time we catch sight of a crucifix—the small one at the end of a rosary, for instance, or the one above the high altar. Small or great, they all say that Christ comes to us in our afflictions, and cannot be put off or turned away by any affliction, however dispiriting or odious it may be.

The kind of Christ we need is the kind of Christ we have—and that, above all, is what we celebrate each time we receive the broken Bread and the poured-out Wine as food for the journey.