God is Love
"God is love", a very extraordinary expression of what God is! He is not simply a "loving person". He is the LOVE itself. God is Trinity! God is essentially LOVE and everything, which refers to true love is referred to God. St. John, the apostle, who recognized himself as "the disciple whom Jesus loved", wrote: "Anyone who fails to love can never have know God, because God is love" (1Jn 4,8) and a little ahead: "God is love and anyone who lives in love lives in God, and God lives in him" (1Jn 4,16).
But the living, visible "LOVE", is Jesus Christ. In Him everyone, who wants to know what love is, may concretely experience it. Jesus Himself stated: "Yes, God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son... not to condemn the world, but so that through him the world might be saved" (Jn 3, 16-17).
In these last times, meditating on the Passion and Death of Jesus, more than ever, I see how only God could do something like that, could love in such a way and show the deepest love of God. The centurion, who accompanied this event and put Jesus to death, understood and proclaimed: "Truly this man was the Son of God" (Mk 15, 39).
Of course, one thing has to be immediately underlined. Between God and our capacity of understanding, there is an infinite and only true faith in the word of God may supply our poor human vision. But those, who allow themselves be enlightened and guided by this faith, find the way of true life and true happiness.
One of these people was St. Paul, in the beginning of his life a persecutor of Christ and of the Christians, but who later, after knowing the love of Christ was able to declare to the Corinthians: "I am overflowing with joy all the more because of all our afflictions" (2 Cor 7,4). And writing to the Galatians: "The life I now live in this body I live in faith:faith in the Son of God who loved me and who sacrificed himself for my sake" (Gal 2, 20).
By this reality that God is love depends all the reality, our person, the society, the universe. From assuming this comes the proper way of life. From this arises all the sense, all the peace and all the happiness of our present existence and forever. GOD IS LOVE!
Fr. Peter Cunegatti