On a few occasions in my life, I’ve been on camps and courses which have used the Warm Fuzzies activity to build group cohesion. Do you know about it? Each person creates a little bag with their name on it which hangs on the wall. Then the other participants write something warm and fuzzy on a bit of paper, and slip it into the bag. The idea is that everyone is consistently affirmed and affirming.
In reality, of course, it can be a tense activity. Who has decorated their bag in their best way? Who has the most warm fuzzies? Who has the least? I have vivid recollections of sneaking in after lights out with other staff to check that everyone has at least one, and covertly writing extra ones for those running short. After a while, people forget about it and have to be reminded, and there’s often one person who turns it into a joke. The activity is not as warm and fuzzy as you might think!
When we read today’s appointed text from the first letter of John, we might want to come away feeling warm and fuzzy. It is, after all, all about love. Love is from God. Everyone who loves is born of God. Love one another. God is love. Those who abide in love abide in God…. It’s like a Beatles song.
And yes, God is love. And yes, we need to love one another. And yes, in loving one another we know God’s presence. And yes, we are called to love God. All of that is true and important.
But to get a handle on the text, it might also help us to understand a little bit more about the Greek and Roman gods who populated the faith and worldview in the communities to which The Elder is writing.
The Greek and Roman Gods, as you might remember from school, are wilful and capricious. They are naughty and proud. They fool around with humanity. They have petty rivalries with one another and get into spats. They occasionally invade the human world and bestow kindnesses and curses. They are petulant, easily offended, and in constant need of placation.
One of the ways of placating the gods is through a hilasmos – a sacrificial offering. This might be something in the home – some fruit or grain placed before a shrine. It might be a more complex ceremony at a temple. It might require an animal sacrifice or some particular prayers or rituals to be enacted. The purpose of the hilasmos is to ward off the wrath of the gods, to buy you some favour and hopefully rebalance any potential badness that might be coming your way.
This is a major, massive contrast to the kind of love that The Elder is describing. Instead of an unpredictable and capricious god who might punish or reward you at any moment without warning or explanation, God is pure love. God is uniformly and consistently loving towards humanity, and this love is then reflected in our relationships with others.
It is hard to describe how different is this picture of God from the image of the gods of the Greek and Roman pantheon. It is dramatically, radically, overwhelmingly different. It is almost the opposite of what the gods were perceived to be. And faith in this God, the one true God, doesn’t just have an intellectual effect on the faithful, it alters the way they relate to each other and to every other human being on the planet.
The Elder uses an analogy to describe how, through Jesus, we can know God. Jesus was sent by God not to toy with humanity, but to be a hilasmon, a sacrificial offering. Jesus, in his life, death and resurrection, abolishes once and for all the need for constant appeasement of the divine wrath. Instead, Jesus embodies the loving attributes of the divine and invites us to emulate them.
No one would want to emulate the Greek and Roman gods. They are to be feared. You cower before them. You try to keep them and their ill will as far away as possible. You don’t copy them!
But the God revealed in Jesus Christ, The Elder seems to be saying, is not only a God you want to be like – but a God we have already seen in human form, living a life based on pure, self-emptying love.
God, the father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is the source of love. This sounds familiar and reassuring to us, but to those early believers, this was a massive shift in relating to the divine. It’s no wonder they were struggling with how to believe, behave and belong – these were remarkable new concepts to integrate.
For these believers in their small communities, everything had changed. Faith in Jesus set them apart and set them at odds with the surrounding society and its expectations. It was no longer necessary to appease the gods through hilasmos. Jesus has brought hilasmos to an end. In this new way of being, the offering one made to God was love of neighbour, which was inspired by and flowed directly from God’s love for us.
Christ is Risen, Alleluia, Alleluia!