(John 3:22-30)
“No man is an island unto itself,” wrote the 17th-century poet John Donne. To which, some 400 years later, the comedian Robin Williams added: “but some are peninsulas.” They both have a point – hard as we might try, human beings cannot ever be totally independent. We are made for relationships.
This is true from the very first moment that we draw breath. Babies don’t just need to be cared for physically- they need to be loved if they are to thrive. In her book Why Love Matters, Sue Gerhardt explains what happens to human beings who do not experience positive social interactions, especially in the first two years of life. While we might not be surprised to learn that a child’s emotional and mental development can be affected by a lack of relationship, the same is true of their physical bodies. One distressing piece of evidence that Gerhardt cites is the case of Romanian orphans in a children’s home, who were kept safe, well fed, and warm, but who were otherwise left alone. Gerhardt writes: “Those who were cut off from close bonds with an adult by being left in their cots all day, unable to make relationships, had a virtual black hole where their orbital frontal cortex should be.” Part of their brains just had not developed.
No one can flourish – in fact, no one can be fully themselves – without other people. Most of us in the West tend to think of ourselves as individuals who then form relationships as we choose, but the reality is somewhat different. There is no “ourselves,” at least not in the fullest sense, without relationship. In other words, it’s not just that we have relationships: we need them. Our relationships are part of who we are. That’s why, when we lack meaningful relationships, we feel lonely. Loneliness is a genuine and deepening problem in our society – and perhaps it’s a genuine and deepening problem for you, personally.
As we continue our series on What God Can’t Do, I’ll ask you: Are relationships essential for God? On the face of it, to say that “God can’t be lonely” might suggest that they aren’t. After all, humans suffer loneliness when they lack relationships, because relationships are an expression of our fundamental nature. To say that God cannot be lonely suggests that relationships function differently for him. Indeed, a God who cannot be lonely might just be forbiddingly aloof: cold and unrelational.
I’ll explain in a moment that this is, thankfully, not the case. God’s lack of loneliness is a vital expression of His independence from the creation. God doesn’t need what He has made to complete some aspect of Himself that would otherwise be unfulfilled. To deny this would be to risk “deifying” the universe: that is, if God cannot be fully Himself without the creation, then in some way the universe is necessary to God and therefore somehow on a par with him. If we were to accept this, we would find ourselves at odd with God’s revelation of Himself: “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14). His existence is not subject to a changing creation – in fact, as we saw last week, the creation is reliant on him. Indeed, the creation couldn’t exist unless He knew it and spoke it into existence.
If His independence from the creation was all we knew of God, then to talk about having a relationship with him – as Christians do – would be a very odd thing. The Greek philosophers such as Aristotle concluded that there must be a “first cause” behind the universe- that is, a god – but thought that such a divine being would be too distant to be knowable. Ancient Christian heresies frequently revealed the influence of this kind of thinking. The Arians of the 4th century, who denied that Jesus could truly be divine, did so in part because of His contact with created things. They just didn’t think it possible that such a distant, independent God could enter His creation in this way.
Therefore, any relationship one might have with such a being would not be something that comes naturally. Love cannot possibly be an expression of their nature, as love inherently involves giving to another. In that sense, any love of God like this might show to us is an act, not an expression of who they are. In fact, it becomes hard to genuinely conceive of such a being as a “who” rather than an “it,” since to be a personal subject as we understand it is to be relational by nature.
Yet, as we open the pages of the New Testament, we find ourselves confronted with these extraordinary words: “God is love” (1 John 4:8). As well as those well-known words from earlier in our Gospel reading; “For God so loved the world …” (John 3:16). If we are to take this seriously, then we must conclude that relationship is every bit as central to the identity of God as it is to human beings. When we consider that human beings are made in the image of God, that may be unsurprising, but in the world of genuinely monotheistic religions it is dynamite.
So, we’re left with attention: how can God be truly God- that is, truly independent- and yet also relational down to the very core?
The same John who wrote “God is love” wrote his gospel account of the life of Jesus with that mystery at its heart. From the books opening line- “in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God” (John 1:1) – to its epilogue, John wants us to know something very specific about Jesus. He sums it up like this:
30 Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. 31 But these are written that you may believe[b] that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
John’s intention is not simply to let us know that Jesus is God, his intention is more focused than that; he wants us to believe that Jesus is “the Son of God.” In fact, the idea that Jesus is truly divine and also in relationship with the divine is the central insight of the Christian faith that sets it apart from any other system of belief that has ever been put forward among human beings. Think again of John’s opening line: “the word was God, and the word was with God.” That one sentence comes filled with world-changing meaning.
In Speaking of Jesus in this way, John reveals a God who can make sense of our human experience while upholding the understanding of God revealed in the Old Testament- as one who is independent and self-existent. God, like us, cannot exist without love, but that love is not dependent on any other being because He exists eternally in relationship. God could never be lonely because He is in Himself never alone; He is 3, not only one. He is Trinity.
In the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ, we are offered a breathtaking glimpse of the reality of God Himself, who exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit an eternal and unbreakable relations of love. God’s trinitarian nature has a number of consequences for the way we see God, ourselves, and the world around us.
First of all, we have a God who not only can love but who does so as an expression of His very nature. God is love, and as Trinity, He expresses love in its fullness. The medieval theologian Richard of St. Victor observed that as three, God can be fulfilled in love not only between two persons, but also in two expressing a shared love of a third. In a world that we cannot either comprehend or inhabit without significant relationships, we know a God who can make sense of it all.
Not only so, but this God can offer to even the most alienated and alone among us the possibility of true relationship – on that can be trusted, and that can restore and heal us at our deepest place of need. As the introduction to John’s Gospel goes on to say: “To all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God – 13 children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God” (John 1:12-13). The Father really is a father, and- as unthinkable as this might sound to anyone who has begun to get ahold of what it means for God to be God- He can be our Father. This is not a stance that God takes towards His people He is, at heart, a Father.
Another picture that God frequently uses in the Bible to describe His relationship to His special people can help us to get our heads around this: that of the bridegroom to his bride. That is the language that John the Baptizer used of Jesus, as we just read: “The bride belongs to the bridegroom. The friend who attends the bridegroom waits and listens for him and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom’s voice. That joy is mine, and it is now complete.”
Now, don’t miss the significance of this: to be united to the sun means that we come to share in a relationship not only to him, but to His Father. To be united to the one who is by nature son means that we can share His prerogative of calling God Father. To be a Christian is actually to be swept up into the turn all relations of love between the Father and the Son. Can you even begin to comprehend the enormity of that?
If you are a Christian, then the closest thing God can find to tell you how he feels about you is the look on a bridegroom’s face when his bride appears at the bottom of the aisle on their wedding day. The love God has for each one of his people is the love that has always existed between the father and the son in eternity. We live in a culture that is obsessed with romantic relationships. We are conditioned to believe that the solution to the longing for connection that we feel is to make sure that we do not go to bed alone. But the Christian goes to sleep and wakes again under the comforting gaze of their Father God.
A second consequence of God’s trinitarian nature is that it causes us to reflect on what is most central to who we are as humans. We live in a time when “identity” and “authenticity” are hugely significant and contested ideas. That we should devote time and energy to discovering who we are and being “true to ourselves” is pretty much a given in western culture in the 21st century. At the same time, the level of confusion and anxiety about those same ideas has soared. But what if, in looking at ourselves, we’re looking in the wrong place? What if my life cannot make sense without a network of independent relationships? What if authentic humanity lies not so much in self-actualization as it does in a commitment to other-person-centered, self-giving love?
Most people come to The Well because they have a financial need that they cannot meet. Rent, utilities, medical bill, etc. If they come back, the vast majority of them do so because they know that they have a place where they can be heard and not judged. Many of them share, in so many words, their struggle with who they are, and/or where they are going. Some of them struggle with addictions and/or clinical depression. Others struggle with self-imposed or family-imposed expectations that they can’t or don’t want to uphold. All of them are facing the truth I shared a while ago from St. Augustine: “Are souls are restless, O Lord, until they find their rest in You.” Most don’t even realize that is the struggle they face. We try each day to help them know that God loves them as much as is heavenly possible. And that they can get a handle on those struggles by receiving that truth and living in it.
Now, I am not so naive as to think that mental health struggles can simply be solved by being told to see the world differently. When appropriate, and it often is, we work with the local mental health organizations to make sure that they have someplace to turn to during the crisis. But when a given crisis does not require medical attention, we are blessed and honored to be used by God to bring self-giving, other-person-centered love into their lives.
It’s good news that God cannot be lonely. He exists in the network of perfectly fulfilled relationships, and as such, we see that such relationships of love must also be central to true human identity. The way to find yourself is in giving yourself to others. It is when we take ourselves out of the center that we become our truest selves. In the world that lies awake fretting over questions of identity, the Christian can sleep well in the shadow of the God who is love. And on our loneliest nights- when bereavement or heartbreak has left us utterly bereft-this is where we can turn for comfort. To belong to God is to be caught up in self-giving, other-person-centered love.
