CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT: ‘God’s love for us is a love of inexpressible intensity’
We tend to associate Valentine’s Day purely with romantic love, but Saint Valentine’s love was altogether more costly. He was a Christian priest or bishop back in 3rd century Rome when you could lose your life as a consequence of admitting to being a follower of Jesus Christ.
Valentine’s faith - his name means ‘strong’ or ‘powerful’ - did not fail, and he was executed by the Roman Emperor in around 269AD.
Legend has him cutting heart-shapes out of parchment and giving these to Christians as a reminder, a token, of the greatest love story ever told. It’s a love story which inspires us too in our 21st century anxieties, our hungering for a sure foundation. A love story where Jesus Christ is the Lover, and humanity the Beloved.
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The Beloved is far, far distant, in the arms of the Rival, lost in malign enchantment. At times, she’s stirred by the faintest of memories of a loveliness irretrievably lost. The Lover sends her tokens of his love, and messengers with love letters. But the words of love are sneered at, the messengers mistreated.
And then the Lover comes himself. ‘I love you!’ ‘Come back to me’. But her eyes are bewitched. She looks straight in his face with disdain and says ‘I know you not.’
And the magistrates come and take him and execute him for his temerity in disclosing such love. But there is deep magic in his dying, and the spell is broken.
The Beloved awakes, the Rival has fled, the Lover, luminously alive, stands in the doorway. At first she hangs her head in shame, but then raises her eyes to find him still there, smiling, beckoning.
I’m conscious that casting the great story in romantic terms may not work for all of us for various reasons. Those parchment hearts - if the legend is true - symbolised a vast love beyond the power of any metaphor to express. God loves us as a lover loves the beloved; as a mother loves a child; as brother loves brother, as sister loves sister, as friend loves friend; as the artist loves their masterwork. God’s love for us is a love of inexpressible intensity, from which nothing can separate us.
Our experiences may have so wounded us that we can scarcely believe we are lovable, or are afraid to give ourselves in love. But we are surrounded daily by many tokens of God’s love if we will only seek the breaking of the spell. The irretrievably lost is redeemable. To each of us, God says: ‘I love you!’
We are all invited to say ‘Yes!’ to Christ our Valentine. For at the end of the story Heaven’s Lover will be re-united with the human race, his dearly Beloved.
