The Beloved Disciple tells us that our God is a loving God. And this great truth underlying all that lives is writ large on the pages of the Holy Scriptures. The first verb in this most holy Book is to create revealing God's Nature: while all life on earth has being, God alone is Being. Yes, we may imitate His Creativity, but He ultimately is the sole Creator. We are so keen to mark the bench in our progress toward "building human life" .... with our Artificial Intelligence and robots! We are so keen! We're closing in on it, you see. But He alone possesses that inimitable magic that brings about, ex nihilo, that holy stirring we call life. And it shall always be so.

True creation is far above our sphere of knowledge and ability. In the space of our daily lives, the most consequential verb in Holy Scripture is to love. Love is the foundation upon which God has created everything. For love is His only motive and continues as His Holy Will. Love is the only verb found in the Two Great Commandments. The Greek underlying this word in the Septuagint Deuteronomy and in Matthew's Gospel is — agápe. Jesus uses this same verb to describe the love of God offered to us in the Son's Passion and Crucifixion .... the word Jesus uses when He calls us to deny ourselves and to lay our lives down for "our friends." And we recall God has called us to be His friends (Jn 15:15).

Oh yes, commentators and theologians have opened their Greek lexicons to demonstrate that agápe has many possible meanings. But they pass over a major point: that Jesus has narrowed His usage to His sacrifice on the Cross and to our self-denying love in favor of God and to the all-consuming, all-involving love that we are to offer God. Jesus has bounded this word, yet we are so keen to dislodge His claims.

Do you see now the connection between to create and to love illuminated in resurrection light? Do you see how God chose love in order to re-create (we say redeem) the whole world? These two words could not be more intimately intertwined.

Sometime during the 20s A.D., long before there was a New Testament, a duel arose between two great teachers, Shammai and Hillel. Hillel the Elder threw down the gauntlet. He said, "I can recite the five books of Torah and the all the Prophets standing on one foot." And now he must make good on this claim. So he assumed the crane-like posture and said,

This is our tradition going far back, the tradition of love. The Old Testament prophets have written:

.... to walk with your God, alongside your God, the One Whose love is so great.

God's love is the animating flame of illuminated life bring us into His creative space of endless possibilities and where, with Him, nothing shall be impossible. This creative love reflects Divine light, which is God's unsurpassable love for us. And we are moved, from our inmost hearts, to requite that love .... just as any child instinctively requites the love of mother and father. This essentially sums up the two great commandments: don't forget to requite that love .... and to love the other members of the family.

Our spiritual life is expressed in God's two great verbs planted deep within our souls. They will not help us in our to study philosophy. They will not help us master logic or mathematics. Nor will the enlargement of our intellectual capacity enlighten us. As Pascal wrote, "The heart has its reasons which reason cannot comprehend" (Pensées).

It is only in contemplating God with a lively soul, a creative soul, and in loving God with a tender heart that we come to speak God's language flooding our souls with His light. Unlike, engineering or science, this illumination permeates down deep. You see, it not just pre-frontal-cortex deep. It permeates down into our inmost selves. Into our souls, into our DNA. This love lies at the center of our consciousness. This is a fact, for neurological imaging has revealed that the limbic system, the seat of our emotions (which had been dismissed a century ago as "noise on the line"), turns out to be "command central" in our brain activity. Truly, "the holiness of the heart's affections" (Keats) turn out to be the main story.

But is there anyone on earth who did not already know this? Is this not the lesson that true love teaches everyone .... even children? Why, love turns our lives upside down! The lover cannot eat, cannot sleep, has lost interest in life .... aside from his love. We will risk our lives for it. We will die for it. It is this power of love which Jesus taught us both in the living of His life and in the manner of His Passion and death. And what is this lesson? Love conquers all. Love is everything.

The holiness of our sacred books lies in their capacity to express love's power. And we recall that God first etched His ways on the fleshly tablets of our hearts before He wrote them in stone (2 Cor 3:3). It is only in contemplating God's love in the thousand-page odyssey of Holy Scripture that we are able to understand it. The Bible cannot be read from its first page to its last. To grasp this mysterious book, we must touch the essences of Divine love and then read from there in love's illumination. The monotonous and inchoate become coherent and compelling. The seemingly pointless becomes meaningful.

Is not this the case in our own daily lives? The many-colored and shaded and tangled threads of life are ordered by love revealing a clear, and often beautiful, picture. No wonder we are born with an instinctual reverence for love. After all, it is the subject of every song, every poem, every book, every film ..... I am exaggerating to make a point. But you see what I mean.

Have you ever noticed that, in the cloud of this vast mystery, the phrase "great hearted" is synonymous with the word "brokenhearted." The broken heart gives rise to the great heart. And only a great heart can truly be broken. The small heart cannot break. Its element is indifference. But the great heart teeters always on the edge for it takes in everything. Joseph Campbell wrote,

Is not this the heart of our Father in Heaven? His Only-begotten Son was mocked, scourged, spitted on, then nailed to a cross. He is also the God and Father of all (Eph 4:4-6). The Triune God must turn His heart to a world over-full of wayward children. I assure you, nothing breaks a parent's heart more surely and deeply than wayward children .... God our Father.

From a war begun in the arrogance of His angels, to our human beginnings in Eden, up to present time, the creatures God has formed in love have broken His heart. And in the depths of these feelings, intimacy with Him has been opened to us. This is the door to God: a broken heart. The Psalmist writes,

Indeed,

We instinctively revere the word brokenhearted. Whole neighborhoods are moved. Casseroles are dropped silently at doorsteps. Compassionate words are whispered. Our hearts become tender. And, in this, brokenheartedness elevates us to the mind of Heaven.

The Lord Jesus set aside His infinite, Heavenly glory to enter the horrible confines of our narrow humanity (Phil 2:5-11). He came unto the creatures He made, and they received Him not (Jn 1:11). He had nowhere to lay His head (Mt 8:20). And in the end, as all the four Gospels record, He was murdered.

Broken. God has revealed that Divine love is brokenhearted love. When He speaks to us in the language of love, these tones cannot but be tinged with sadness. Here is this "still sad music of humanity" (Wordsworth). And this is our element of life. My brothers and sisters, we are family, but ours is a broken family. We participate in the marriage of Heaven and earth, but it is a marriage stained by many infidelities (Hosea 2) and rooted in grief.

As in all families, relationships are meaningless if our hearts are not in it. That is the fundamental family question: "Are we in, or are we out?" Do we have in stake in the lives of our brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and uncles and aunts and cousins? Will we be our brother's keeper (Gen 4:9)? Will we bear his burdens? Will we be moved to tears over his sorrows? Or will we be propelled through life by our own egos, distancing the others from ourselves .... even mocking them, which makes our hearts contract into little, hardened stones.

Alas, this world of narcissism is all around us. Our news cycle is dominated by little more than movie-star-magazine stories. The world of one .... Americans now live in one-person domiciles. They commute in one-person car pools. They dine alone. They watch movies alone .... often ensconced in whole film libraries acquired for one. How the world rejoices we when two people will ride in a car together! Whole lanes of highways are opened to them — a royal road for the conquering heroes!

Do you recall the song from the 1960's "Don't Make Me Over" (Now that I Love You)? Is this is not what we have done with the God Who loves us? We have reduced God (to borrow C.S. Lewis' image) to a senile old grandfather with a great white beard who just wants everyone to be happy and His Son into a meek little man who just wants everyone to be nice. Is not this true?

The lectionaries of the Western Church are tortured with commas and semicolons as we strive to skirt Scriptures that offend us. For the uncomfortable passages confront us with our faithlessness.

The Parable of the Good Samaritan we like. The Judgment of Capernaum and Bethsaida we don't like. The Sermon on the Mount we like .... unless we read it too closely. The Parable of the Tares and the Wheat we don't like. We like the sending out of the Apostles, but we do not like the judgment of destruction visited upon those who do not receive them. We always choose blessings and we always ignore curses. We are able to have it all our way, for who, I ask, will stop us? Certainly not the Western priests and bishops who have invented a new Church designed to win acceptance for their own, once-forbidden lifestyles. Don't throw stones at glass houses if you live in one.

The love of God? Surely, this is the one-way love for the ages.

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Small wonder the word justify should loom so large in their speech. For protesting one's rectitude goes to the heart of the Pharisee. The anthropology of faith it engenders is "me and God" .... rampant in our own time. Yes, this love involves no others, unless it be to depreciate or dismiss them:

If the Jews are the children of Abraham, here certainly is a withdrawn and inward-looking son. He doesn't like family reunions because he does not wish to soil himself. He is like the proud son of every age, cutting himself off from family, surrounding himself with fantasy: he is the hero of his imagination. Every story is about him. Stop and talk to him. He will happily regale you in his favorite subject. Certainly, God must be gotten rid of. You see, God demands blistering honesty and self-examination.

In Him is no love, for love is outward-looking. In Him is no creativity, for he glories in keeping his rules and commandments. There is no room for creative thinking here. Yet, ironically, the proud Pharisee certainly would have known of Hillel the Elder. He would surely have heard of the famous duel with Shammai. And the Two Great Commandments? He would have recited them thousands of times in Judaism's greatest prayer, the Shemah. Unaccountably, he has traded in the mind and heart of love, in which life itself resides. He has traded this for a cold and lifeless calculus.

Standing not far from him is a tax collector, a Publican. In many ways, he is not so different from the Pharisee. He, too, would have been arrayed in splendid clothing. He, too, sought public honor. He was a high-ranking official, of the Societas Publicanorum, in the Equestrian class (just below the Senatorial class).

Perhaps, like me, you grew up hearing that the tax collector was reviled by all Judeans as he was permitted to pad the tax bill to his own profit. But Augustus Caesar had long before reformed this practice. The Publican would have been respected in general society and influential among other high-caste Judeans — overseeing public works projects and enjoying symposia with other key leaders.

A boy reared in Hellenized Jerusalem would have said, "When I grow up, I want to be like him." He wore cool clothing. He lived in an awesome house. Like the Pharisee, the Publican chose upward mobility. He did not make it "to the top" by being a humble helper in the community.

But for all his riches and prestige, he now realizes that his life has become a vacancy, a lonely desolation, which has turned to mock him. He is alienated — from others, from himself, and from God. He does not so much as "raise his eyes to Heaven." "To love mercy and to walk humbly with God?" He has fallen far beneath that standard. He has turned away from the life that is nourished in God's love. He has rejected the life of God's creative world of interrelationship. Instead, he chose to climb the corporate ladder occupying his life with gamesmanship, always pushing down the man in front him that he might climb higher. And now standing in the Temple, he takes in the enormity of all he has lost, and he beats his breast. His heart is broken.

This is the essence of our Gospel today. It is the story of intimacy with the Divine, which is lost. Yet, when our lives are shattered and after the dust of our ruin blows away, there alone is God Who is near to the brokenhearted. And here begins a new life — a life that is truly free and now filled with meaning.

Our hearts being stretched to unbearable limits, we are finally capable of great love, of great-heartedness. The broken heart has given rise to the great heart. The small, the petty, the restless ego disappear. We have no interest in these things. We are ready to bear every burden, to walk the last mile (Mt 5:41), and to endure every insult (Mt 5:38-40). God has prepared us.

The law of love was always being handed down to us — in Eden, from the heights of Mt. Sinai, and then given definitively on the Mount of the Beatitudes.

Today a tax collector receives this incommensurable gift in the shadows of the Temple. He has been broken to his foundations. The debris of life has been swept away. And he is now open and ready to hear and receive every challenging word. He is ready for God's kind of love .... with all his heart and soul and mind. Today in the Temple, a new creature has been formed. He is created anew with the magic only God possesses. He is consecrated in love, even in Divine love. And he will be justified before Heaven, for in the end only God's love can bring about our justification.

Like His Elder Brother, the First-born of Creation (Col 1:15), he has humbled himself. And in this, he has been re-born. For today unto us a son is given. And his name, from here, shall be wonderful.

In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.