Love – cruciformatio

Reflections on Love: Four Principles from Herbert’s Love (III)

Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet, Ford Madox Brown, 1876

This post is part of a series. Click the link for Parts 1 & 2.

Last time I introduced you to Herbert’s poem “Love (III),” and invited you into it—to meet the loving Jesus Christ who Herbert would like to introduce you to.

Here I want to draw a few principles from it about God and God’s love. These four principles don’t exhaust the treasure to be found in the poem, but they do help distill its essence.

Hopefully, in doing so, you can carry these principles into your entire life—certainly your worship and prayer life, but not only there! God wants your entire life, from waking to sleeping, to be permeated by his love.

So here we go:

Reflections on Love: Being Loved by God, or Love (III) by George Herbert

This post is part of a series. To see Part 1, click here.

“Love (III)” is one of my favorite poems because it speaks to the heart of the matter: what does it look like to be loved by God? Composed by George Herbert in the 17^th century, it is his most celebrated poem. It also concludes the main section of The Temple, the collection of Herbert’s English poems.

Here is the poem in full (it belongs to the public domain), with the spelling modernized:

Reflections on Love: Why Does It Even Matter?

This blog post started as a reflection on a poem, but it started to get pretty long. I realized I didn’t want to test everyone’s attention span, so I decided to split it up into a series that will attempt to unfold what love means for those who follow Christ.

Christians talk a lot about love. They claim that God loves them.

One early writer says that God has given Christians a new life because God’s love for them was so strong. Elsewhere, he writes that God’s love is so powerful and large that nothing can overcome or overpower it. Nothing is bigger or stronger than it (Eph 2:4-5; Rom 8:38-39).

From Heart to Heart

One of the disciples, the one Jesus loved, was leaning back on Jesus’s chest.

John 13:23

Has anyone ever let you close enough to hear the rhythm of their heartbeat? Perhaps when you were young your mother or father let you rest your head against their chest and listen. Or maybe as a child you and your closest friend would take a break from playing to listen to that mysterious rhythm in each other. Or perhaps a lover opened their heart to you and let you hear that secret song that plays within them.

It’s not often that another person lets you in so close that you can hear their beating heart. In fact, being given the privilege to put your ear against someone’s chest is such a personal and vulnerable display of affection—you could almost say the pulse within them is the sound of their love for you.

I’ve always wondered—in that moment described in the verse above, did John get near enough to hear it? That night, as that group of thirteen friends ate their final meal together, was John able to hear the pulse of Jesus’s heart?

Plum Blossoms

Therefore, we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

2 Corinthians 4:16-18

Every year I wait for the plum blossoms. They come when winter loses its chilly grip and the warm kiss of spring begins to wake the lone plum tree in my yard. Soon, its branches are filled with the glory of thousands of pink blossoms, and every time I pass by, the sight of them fills me with joy.

Yet, the blossoms don’t wait around for long. After only a few weeks they’re packed up and gone, and I have another year to wait for them.