The eternal need of love

O Oriens

O Orient, Brightness of the Eternal Light, and Sun of Righteousness: Come, and lighten them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.

Permit me today a divergence from the Anglican sequence so far this Advent. The Rev’d George MacDonald (1824-1905) was a Scottish Congregationalist, but his influence was such on twentieth century Anglican writers, not least C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, that inclusion of his words here is not too drastic a departure. They are apposite to today’s contemplation of the rising sun and Morning Star, Christ, whose radiance is the visible reflection of the invisible light of the Father, and is the love which binds and animates all things. The Christian vision of love is as metaphysical as it is mystical. —T.P.

From George MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons

The bond of the universe, the harmony of things, the negation of difference, the fact at the root of every vision, revealing that love is the only good in the world, and selfishness the one thing hateful, in the city of the loving God, is the devotion of the Son to the Father. It is the life of the universe.

It is not the fact that God created all things that makes the universe a whole; but that he through whom he created them loves him perfectly, is satisfied to be because his father is with him. For there can be no unity, no oneness where there is only one. For the very beginnings of unity there must be two.

Without Christ, therefore, there could be no universe. The reconciliation wrought by Jesus was the necessary working out of the eternal antecedent fact, that God and Christ are one, the Son loving the Father and the Father loving the Son as only the Father and Son can love. The prayer of the Lord for unity between men and the Father and himself springs from the eternal need of love. But for the Father and the Son, no two would care a jot the one for the other.

It might be right for creatures to love because of mere existence, but what two creatures would ever have originated the loving? But if the Father loves the Son, if the very music that make the harmony of life lies in the burning love in the hearts of Father and Son, then glory be to the Father and the Son, drawing us up into the glory of their joy, to share in the thoughts of love that pass between them, in their thoughts of delight and rest in each other, in their thoughts of joy in all the little ones. The life of Jesus is the light of men, revealing to them the Father.

O Lord Jesu Christ, Who art the outshining of Thy Father's glory,
Light streaming forth from Light:
Thou didst come in the incarnation
to our poor darkened world
as the Sun of Righteousness
bringing healing in Thy beams,
dispelling noxious influences,
and gladdening men's hearts with the good news
of their Father's kindness and love for man:
Come, we pray Thee, now by Thy grace,
and through Thy Church let Thy truth and love shine forth to all that are in the darkness
of sin or ignorance or error;
penetrate the hidden recesses of our hearts,
and enlighten the cruel habitations of the earth.

(The Advent Antiphons With Scripture references and paraphrases. By A.C.A. Hall, Bishop of Vermont.)