Love is to will the good of the other. Love is self-gift. Love entails commitment and sacrifice.

That is, God is the seminal source of all life in the universe and the essence of God is love. This is the characteristic and exuberant proclamation from the initial followers of Jesus in the records of their experiences with him. In fact, two attributes literally shine forth as primary and enduring in the corpus of writings and the testimony of Jesus’ initial followers: that God is light, and that God is love. St. John’s first epistle boldly attests to the former of these in the opening stanza in the record of Jesus’ life and Gospel ministry: 

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

He was with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made, and without

Him nothing was made that has been made. In Him was life, and that life was the light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

There came a man who was sent from God. His name was John. He came as a witness to testify about the Light, so that through him everyone might believe. He himself was not the Light, but he came to testify about the Light. The true Light, who gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through Him, the world did not recognize Him. He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him. But to all who did receive Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God—children born not of blood, nor of the desire or will of man, but born of God.

We read in this passage, not only that Christ (pre-incarnate) is the Word (or Logos), but that all things were made through Him; that He is, thereby, the source of life. That ‘life’ translates itself into the lives of ‘men’ (humankind) as light. Upon these premises we are left to the delightful deduction that wherever light is found in any person, God, too, is found in them as the very source of that light. Despite the darkness that we may find within ourselves, within our neighbor, or within any environment or institution, if there is any light in it, its source is God and therefore God is present there. This is what it means that “The Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1: 5). This awareness is bookended on the other side by the Epistles of St. John, where God is expressed not only in terms of life and light (“This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.” (1 John 1:5)), but as love: 

Beloved, let us love one another; for love is from God, and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love. By this the love of God was revealed in us, that God has sent His only Son into the world so that we may live through Him. (1 John 4:7-9) (italics added)

That the followers of Jesus could reflect upon little else following their living encounters with the One Whom they learned as both Master and Friend ought to instruct our thought as to both the essence of God and the essence of the world that He made. Correspondingly, any declarations or representations of God which do not center on these attributes as the very heart and essential nature of God ought to invoke a strong suspicion in us. Such declarations abound in this world and so, therefore, ought our suspicions to abound, for as John’s first epistle attests, “And this is His commandment: that we should believe in the name of His Son, Jesus Christ, and we should love one another just as He commanded us. Whoever keeps His commandments remains in God, and God in him. And by this we know that He remains in us: by the Spirit He has given us.” (1 John: 3:23-24)

The New Testament is shot through with such a message. St. Paul’s Christian cosmology is revealed at depth in his letter to the Colossians where Christ is presented as both the source and recipient of this world and in each of the remaining epistles attributed to St. Paul.

The vulnerability we carry as embodied creatures entails that our wills (spirit or heart as they are used interchangeably in the New Testament) are unbridled, unruly and are disposed to desires to which we routinely succumb in opposition to love. The human journey is, thus, one marked by the requirement to learn to love; to appropriate our original and deepest nature—the essence of God’s image in us as love—by learning (painstakingly) to bring our body and its desires under the governance of a rightly ordered will (mind and heart) to such an extent that there is nothing left of our wills but the will to love. This is the essence of what it means to have our salvation “worked out” in us and it is a staggering task, one that will involve “fear and trembling.” In this, the heart of Jesus, we are progressively purged of any impulse that is not aligned with the His agape love. Just as was true for his initial apprentices, we learn this by walking with him. Apprentices of Jesus endeavor with His help, to love. And as we endeavor to love, we discover what true personhood involves; we become ourselves in Christ as we join him in his mission to bring all of creation, under the auspices of his love, into right relationship.