God is love

I was/am struck by an amazing coincidence. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column about the pope's encyclical called "Deus Caritas Est" or God is love. It appeared in the bulletin this weekend. In the meantime, since the readings for this weekend are saturated with love language, I wrote my homily on the same topic.

Here's what I emphasize in my homilty. God's love is a full understanding of love...a self-less love. We love God because God loved us and sent us his son. We, in turn, love each other with that same kind of love that God first loved us with. I highlight that our culture is fixated on erotic love, or eros, but that God's love is more than just eros and moves in the direction of what is called agape.

I was going to make my point even more explicit by stating, "That's why we shouldn't need to believe that Jesus had sex and fathered children in order to believe that he is human. Any animal can have sex and breed. Jesus' accomplishment was that he taught us the meaning of selfless love and, in the process, gave us a goal of what it means to be fully human." But I didn't. I'm still struggling with how to respond to DaVinci evil.