If you were asked to sum up what Christians believe in a single sentence, I wonder what you would choose to say? A strong contender might be; ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son….’. Jn 3:16; but what do we mean when we say God ‘loves’ our world? Here are 2 images.
On Christmas Eve, 1968, the crew of Apollo 8, the first humans to orbit the Moon, read from the Book of Genesis during a television broadcast. Some of the first people to get a ‘God’s-eye view’ of our world from space, appreciating its beauty and fragility, read: ‘When God began to create the heavens and the earth,…..God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good,…..And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars.’ God has treasured our world from the start.
Yet to grasp what it means for God to love us I also need something less vast.
Julian of Norwich, mystic of the Middle Ages, used a very different image in her Revelations of Divine Love: “he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand…..I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marvelled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it…. In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it.”
In something as light and inconsequential as a hazelnut one might find in a hedgerow, a frugal foodstuff you could gather for free, Julian is struck by the depth of our significance to God.
Her words chime with those of Jesus: ‘Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid….’.
A mere hazelnut can become an eloquent communication of God’s love – nothing, and no one, is unloved by God – a love both deep and wide, intimately personal and endlessly vast.
The implications are immense. How then does God view the extinction of any part of his creation, the pollution of his earth and air and waters? How does God view the suffering of any human being, any hungry child, any family living in fear among bomb rubble? It matters to God beyond anything we can imagine. It mattered so much to God that he sent Jesus, his own Son, so that we might see his love in the flesh, right amongst us; and recognise that love present, here, now and always: a love for our whole beautiful, battered planet, and a love for each one of us.
Nothing which perturbs and distresses us is beneath God’s notice – nothing which wakes us in the night, no fear which haunts us, no loss which grieves us. Like the hazel in God’s palm are we; ‘For God so loved the world……’.
Revd Kate McFarlane
