Advent (4A): The Fear of Love

Preparing Ourselves to Receive What We Cannot Repay

“Again the LORD spoke to Ahaz, saying, Ask a sign of the LORD your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven. But Ahaz said, I will not ask, and I will not put the LORD to the test” (Isa. 7:10-12)

“Now the birth of the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife’” (Mt. 1:18-20).

The final candle of Advent represents Love. We enthusiastically speak of love when, in reality, we are more hesitant to receive it than we like to admit. We enshrine love in our songs and poems, we praise its goodness, all the while harboring a secret fear of what it might mean if we really experienced it. “It’s silly,” you say, “to be afraid of love” but brief reflection will show that to be the case.

”In reality we all need at times, some of us most times, that Charity from others which, [God] being Love Himself in them, loves the unlovable. But this, though a sort of love we need, is not the sort of love we want. We want to be loved for our cleverness, beauty, generosity, fairness, usefulness” (C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, chp.5). We had rather feel that the affection we are offered is deserved. “Well of course s/he loves me, I am good looking after all.” “Who has any doubt that s/he loves me? I’ve such a wonderful sense of humor.” “Love me? She could hardly resist me! I showered her with gifts.” Whatever behavior or characteristic we identify we would like to believe that somehow we have merited the adoration and friendship of others. Love at its highest, however, is completely unmerited. Even farther, it is not merely undeserved but love amidst contradiction! We are not loved “because of” but “in spite of.” And while intellectually we acknowledge such love as being the strongest, purest, and holiest, it is the sort of love we much prefer to give and are not very keen to receive. “The first hint that anyone is offering us the highest love of all is a terrible shock. This is so well recognised [sic] that spiteful people will pretend to be loving us with Charity precisely because they know it will wound us. To say to one who expects a renewal of Affection, Friendship, or Eros, ‘I forgive you as a Christian’ is merely a way of continuing the quarrel. Those who say it are of course lying. But the thing would not be falsely said in order to wound unless, if it were true, it would be wounding” (ibid).

The facts of the case are twofold: 1. We do not like to be in another’s debt. We like things on an even keel. It is fine that you do me a good turn but only because I had already done you one (or I will soon in the future). To be given a gift that we know we could never repay somehow makes us uneasy. It is a power dynamic that makes us feel “beneath” or “less than.” Our pride will not allow it. 2. In order to recognize that we are being loved “in spite of” our unloveliness (whatever that trait may be) we must admit that unloveliness. We must admit the we are grumpy in the mornings. We must confess that we did shout. We have to own up to being irritable when we haven’t eaten. Whatever the thing is, in order to admire a love that loves “in spite of,” there must be something to spite, and that thing resides in us. Again, our pride does not like that admission. Receiving Love which is “love indeed” exposes our great need, and we loathe being “needy.”

”There is something in each of us that cannot be naturally loved. It is no one’s fault if they do not so love it. Only the lovable can be naturally loved. You might as well ask people to like the taste of rotten bread or the sound of a mechanical drill. We can be forgiven, and pitied, and loved in spite of it, with Charity; no other way. All who have good parents, wives, husbands, or children, may be sure that at some times—and perhaps at all times in respect of some one particular trait or habit—they are receiving Charity, are loved not because they are lovable but because Love Himself is in those who love them” (ibid).

Ahaz was offered a gift that he did not deserve and he could not repay. It could be any sign, “as deep as Sheol or high as heaven.” We might think we would enthusiastically accept such an offer ourselves but when we consider all that we’ve said above Ahaz’s reponse makes a little more sense. “I will not put the LORD to the test.”

St. Joseph was also granted a great gift. When Joseph was moved to put away holy Mary “quietly” we are only told that he did so because we was “just” and, as revealed by the angel, “afraid.” It is commonly assumed that he was motivated by suspicion of her adultery. He was afraid that others would believe him to have lain with her before their marriage and his justice was revealed in his desire to put her away without making a public spectacle of her.

There is, however, another and very ancient interpretation going back at least as early as Origen of Alexandria in the early 3rd century. In this interpretation St. Joseph sought to put her away—not because he did not understand—but precisely because he did! St. Thomas Aquinas mentions this in his commentary on The Gospel of St. Matthew as well as his Catena Aurea (Golden Chain) which is a kind of parallel commentary collecting the opinions of many ancients on the text of the Gospel. According to Aquinas, Origen wrote, “But if he had no suspicion of her, how could he be a just man, and yet seek to put her away, being immaculate? He sought to put her away, because he saw in her a great sacrament, to approach which he thought himself unworthy” (Catena Aurea). Again, “But according to Jerome and Origen, he had no suspicion of adultery. For Joseph knew Mary’s purity and had read in the scripture that a virgin would conceive (Isa. 7:14) and in 11:1: ‘There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.’ He had also known that Mary had descended from David. Hence, it was easier for him to believe that this had been fulfilled in her than that she had fornicated. And so, considering himself unworthy to live together with such holiness, he wanted to put her away secretly” (Commentary on St. Matthew’s Gospel).

In this interpretation we see again something like a reticence to receive gifts of Love. Ahaz would not receive the sign. St. Joseph would not receive the Immaculate Virgin and her holy child. We, like Joseph, need to hear the words of the angel, “Do not be afraid.” The offer of Love is the offer of God Himself for “God is Love” (1 Jn. 4:8), and perhaps that is why we so often reject Him.

Accepting Love, the highest Love, the Love which we cannot repay, is an acceptance of our inherent Need; It is an acceptance of our creatureliness. “For what do you have that you did not receive?” (1 Cor. 4:7).

But we recoil at being creatures! “No sooner do we believe that God loves us than there is an impulse to believe that He does so, not because He is Love, but because we are intrinsically lovable. The Pagans obeyed this impulse unabashed; a good man was ‘dear to the gods’ because he was good. We, being better taught, resort to subterfuge. Far be it from us to think we have virtues for which God could love us. But then, how magnificently we have repented! As Bunyan says, describing his first and illusory conversion, ‘I thought there was no man in England that pleased God better than I.’ Beaten out of this, we next offer our own humility to God’s admiration. Surely He’ll like that? Or if not that, our clear-sighted and humble recognition that we still lack humility. Thus, depth beneath depth and subtlety within subtlety, there remains some lingering idea of our own, our very own, attractiveness. It is easy to acknowledge, but almost impossible to realise [sic] for long, that we are mirrors whose brightness, if we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us. Surely we must have a little—however little—native luminosity? Surely we can’t be quite creatures?” (Lewis, Four Loves, chp. 5).

But we are! We are creatures! And all that we have is as much gift as the sign to Ahaz. It is as much gift as the virgin birth. Our life, our virtues, our beauty, our goodness, is all gift. We are creatures. We we stand in need, and it is need “all the way down.” So if we are to be faced with God at all we must be faced with the God who gives a Love we could never merit and a love we could never repay. He would give us Himself, as He does in Christmas, and Advent is intended to prepare us to receive Him. To receive love is to humbly—for there is no other way!—confess our need. But therein is our freedom. “For all the time this illusion to which nature clings as her last treasure, this pretense that we have anything of our own or could for one hour retain by our own strength any goodness that God may pour into us, has kept us from being happy. We have been like bathers who want to keep their feet—or one foot—or one toe—on the bottom, when to lose that foothold would be to surrender themselves to a glorious tumble in the surf. The consequences of parting with our last claim to intrinsic freedom, power, or worth, are real freedom, power and worth, really ours just because God gives them and because we know them to be (in another sense) not ‘ours.” (ibid). All that is “ours” is “His”! “The earth is the LORD’s and all that is in it” (Ps. 24:1).

Paul begins his letters over and over, as we read this fourth Sunday, “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 1:7). What else is there when we are creatures in need? All is grace. All is Love, a Love which is unmerited, a Love we cannot repay. We have to learn to receive a Love like that because God cannot give Himself apart that; It is all He is. Advent prepares us for Christmas, it prepares us to accept Love into our lives as creation accepted Christ in the stable.

“Let the LORD enter; He is King of Glory.”