Something miraculous is happening in this reading, Jesus is inviting us into the circle of divine love which is the Trinity.” St. Augustine describes the trinity like this. God the Father poured out his love completely and fully onto the Son. The Son completely and fully receives it, and returns His love completely and fully back to the Father. And the love shared between them is the Holy Spirit. This is divine perfect love and it is the model and source from which all love flows.
I would like to explain a little more what it means to fully and completely give and receive love. The greeks have 8 words for love. Four are what we call the lower loves, and there are four which we call the higher loves. The higher loves are: eros (romantic love), storge (familial love), philio (love of friends), and agape (selfless sacrificial love). The last three are pretty self-explanatory, but eros I think gets a bad rap. It gets lumped in with erotic pleasure, but when you study the greek meanings of these words, you come to understand that eros is far, far more than that. It is the total and complete reception of love. This is not selfish, it is the understanding that love is a gift, and that gifts need to be given & received.
So when you fully and completely receive love you validate the gift, and you honor the giver, and that exchange of that gift creates new life. This is why marriage is model of perfect trinitarian love. When a spouse fully and completely pours out his love on his spouse and she fully and completely recieves it, the love exchanged becomes a new creation. Marriage is a bond that unifies two people in a relationship that is closer than any other thing in the world. The husband and wife are no longer individuals but one being, bonded in the atomic connections of love. And this new creation often, and eventually results in a new life, in the form of a new baby. This is why the family is so important, and also why the evil one so desperarelty wants to destroy it. This is also why broken marraiges are like nuclear explosions, because it breaks something apart that was bonded and fused together at an atomic level, and the result is catastrophic destruction.
But beyond the love of the marraige, there is another love that is being proposed here. Our Lord, God the Father, is inviting us into the trinitarian, divine love as well. God wants to be wedded to us, just like a wedding among spouses, and wants us to participate in the exchange of divine agape, and divine eros, with Him. This is remarkable among world religions, and utterly incomprehensible when you ponder it. God, creator of the universe, omnipotent and omniscient, wants to be bonded to you at that same atomic level, and to have as intimate a connection with you as is humanly possible. Think of that, it is incredible. And that is what it means, in this reading, to “complete your joy”
When God created you, he created you with a purpose, and in His divine will, He hoped that you would fulfill it. He hoped that you would take your place in His divine kingdom, and participate in that purpose that he willed for you. There is a role that you will play in His kingdom, a role that only you can completely fulfill, and that role will be missed if you reject God, and using your free will decide to do what you want to do instead. If you reject His will for your life, you will end up in hell, and your absence will be noticed in heaven.
But if you do choose to wed yourself to Him, and take your place in heaven and live out your purpose as God willed it, you will get to do something that I think is the most amazing thing of all…, you will get to help complete Gods joy as well. Everything in this world, every person you know, even your own life is a gift from God. All you have to do to thank Him for His generosity, is to turn to Him, bond your heart with His, and by helping to complete His Joy, you will at the same time, complete your own. Amazing!
