What love is

Popular songs pretend to tell us about love.

Movies pretend to tell us about love (or try to substitute coitus in the metropolis or something like that).

Worst of all, so-called experts – some educated and some not so much, even some within the Church – pretend to tell us what love is.

What all of these say about love is invariably shallow and often terribly wrong.

Today’s second reading (1 John 4:7-16) tells us what love really is: love that was ultimately and perfectly revealed on the cross by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Beloved,
let us love one another,
because love is of God;
everyone who loves
is begotten by God
and knows God.

Whoever is without love
does not know God,
for God is love.

In this way the love of God was revealed to us:
God sent his only Son into the world
so that we might have life through him.

In this is love:
not that we have loved God,
but that he loved us
and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.

Beloved, if God so loved us,
we also must love one another.