By the Way: Love of God burns at the centre of spiritual solar system

By Medicine Hat News on July 22, 2017.

I appreciate the agrarian metaphors that Jesus uses in his parables. Like most parables they connect with us at a basic level, presuppose our common experience and often surprise us with the way this experience opens up onto the vistas of spiritual truth. I wanted to reflect today on the analogy Jesus uses between our hearts as different types of soil and words (ideas/images) as seeds. First, we know that the type of plant we get is dependent upon the seed we plant. Second, we know that the sort of soil we plant in (along with water and sunlight) has a big influence on the quality of the plant we get.

There are some obvious connections to spiritual truths here: Be careful what you plant — the fruit in your life will be the development of the attitudes, ideas and images that you have “planted.” And, the more consistently you “plant” these ideas, the more likely these ideas will be what grows in your life.

So, you may want to choose wisely. Further, there are ways to prepare our inner person to be better soil, to be more likely to produce healthy and fruitful plants. We can think of ways of tilling the soil of our hearts, pulling the spiritual weeds and picking the spiritual rocks. Of course, the ideas Jesus is referring to are the words of God, and the ideal soil is the heart who responds with a confident trust in the word of God. This scenario, says Jesus leads to a harvest that bears fruit, up to 100 per cent gain! Not a bad return.

Now, sticking to my focus on the Way of Love, I want to draw out another implication of this parable. The sun, which is a necessary ingredient in a plant’s growth, can also be detrimental. Here in Medicine Hat we well know the effect of hot, dry weather on the countryside and our lawns and gardens. If we take the sun to represent the love of God, its beneficial influence fosters the growth of the plants in our lives. In what can only be called a profound mystery, however, the same love of God can be experienced as a negative effect.

An old adage may help us here: “The same sun which softens wax hardens clay.” This maybe one reason for the mixed understanding and articulation of the love of God: different people experience it differently. Or, to stick to our agrarian metaphor, different plants and different types of soil respond differently to the same mix of sun and water.

The orthodox tradition tells us that the love of God and the wrath of God are the same thing; the difference is in the person who encounters God.

Why do I say this? To remind us that love, in order to be anything meaningful, must have the capacity to express itself as a threat and danger to those who are, in their souls, turned against Love. Far from being some warm, comforting, self-reinforcing sentiment, the Love of God (like the sun) is a blast furnace that burns at the centre of the spiritual solar system! Yes, it is the source of all life. But, if conditions necessitate, it is also a threat to life.

Rev. Oz Lorentzen is from St. Barnabas Anglican Church.

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