The whole of our time on earth is given to us to develop, through ordinary living as Christians, our ability to live with God for ever. We have to play our own considerable part in preparing ourselves in this life to be able to see God and live with Him in the next, and of course we can only do this by living with Him in this temporal life as well. If we are to fit in to the life of heaven with God, there is a considerable amount of change to be brought about in ourselves and no change in God at all. In the context of eternal life, being with God is life and being without Him is death. What is more, being with God is not a very precise way of describing everlasting life, whether we mean its beginnings here on earth or its fulfillment in heaven. We have to share in a mysterious way in the very life of God, and not just live beside Him, as it were.
Now, God is love, and there is no way whatever of sharing in God’s life except by means of love. Love and life are so closely linked that anything which we do or think against love or reducing our love reduces our life by that very fact. Selfishness, which is a fictitious love for ourselves—fictitious because it excludes God and others—is not real love at all, and, therefore, is not part of life but of death. Selfishness is a very solid coffin.
Although even the love we have for God or others comes from Him and from no where else, it is up to us to develop and increase it by our own free activity. If God increased it without our own efforts and choices, it would not be our love which increased but only His gift to us, and it would not change us as persons. The capacity we shall have in order to enjoy our union with God in heaven depends on how far we expand our capacity to love while on earth. God’s grace enables us to do this, but our own responses and cooperation are needed, otherwise it would not be part of us, but life separate from us in God.
Jesus is our life, and He is incarnate love. On earth He lived a human life of pure love for God, and what is more extraordinary, He lived a life of pure love for us, despite our sins, which in no way put Him off loving us; for He came to give life to sinners, to give love to them. We are saved by love.
Those on earth who are dead because they lack the virtue of love, a condition we call the state of mortal sin, can be raised from the dead. They can be raised from the dead and made alive again because of the overflowing, supreme love that Jesus poured out in His Passion and Death. It was because of this promised pouring of God’s love into human life, which he foretold, that the prophet Ezekiel could speak of graves being opened and the Spirit of God giving life to those who were dead. Jesus came to set us free from death caused as always by sin, and from the coffins or graves of selfishness, for all selfishness is sin, and all sin is selfishness.
St John of the Cross says that when we die we shall be examined on love. That will determine how much or how little life we have in us. One of the greatest stimuli to make us love someone is to know that he loves us. If we only began to understand that Jesus loves us without limit and without conditions, our own love for Him, our love for God, would explode.
. . . Let us try to bring home to ourselves the lessons or proofs of how Jesus loves us by thinking of His voluntary but intolerable sufferings of Body and Soul and Heart for us. They teach us not only how destructive sin is, but also give clear practical proof that nothing will put Jesus off loving us, nothing in ourselves nor anything outside ourselves. But one thing He will not and cannot do. He cannot force us to love Him, for love is an absolutely free gift from God to us and from us to God. He makes us able to love Him perfectly, but we have to do it.
