The Four Degrees of Love

Proper 23, Year C
 
Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7           or         2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15
Psalm 66:1-12                 or         Psalm 111
2 Timothy 2:8-15                                    
Luke 17:11-19   
 
About 1,000 years ago, St. Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, wrote about what he called the four degrees of love.  These degrees of love, when placed in order, suggest a gradual development of love within a person, much like the physical or intellectual development of a person from birth through old age.
 
St. Bernard's degrees of love not only help us to explain the behavior of the lepers in Luke 17, but they can also give us an idea of where we're at, and what other possibilities there are for spiritual growth.
 
Most people begin life just trying to survive.  Some people struggle for the basics of food, clothing, shelter, and security most of their lives, through no fault of their own.  They develop a survival mentality that carries over into their relationships which never has the chance to grow into something more beautiful.  People in this first degree of love, according to St. Bernard, usually love themselves for their own sake.
 
Perhaps the nine lepers who didn't return to give thanks to God were at this basic level of love.  They were healed, and possibly attributed this healing to their good fortune, without the slightest thought of gratitude to God or anyone else.
 
Perhaps a slightly more spiritually mature approach was the one taken by the lone leper who returned to Jesus to praise God "with a loud voice."  This reflects what St. Bernard would call the second degree of love, where a person loves God, but still for his or her own sake.  The person realizes where his or her help originated, and as the psalmist declares, "I lift up my eyes to the hills; from where will my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth." (Psalm 121:1-2)  God is loved as a provider of help and comfort.
 
If this happens enough, St. Bernard suggests, then the person may actually begin to understand the nature of God's love, exclaiming as did the psalmist, "O taste and see that the Lord is Good..." (Psalm 34:8)  At this point the person actually begins to love God for God's sake.  This is the third degree of love.  As in loving other people for their sake, we wish the best for them, we try to help them, we promote them because of who they are, not because of who we are, and sometimes it may cost us something to do so.
 
St. Paul reaches (and often goes beyond) this point.  We see an example of this when he writes to Timothy, "I endure everything for the sake of the elect..."  He is willing to endure hardships to promote his belief in Christ, "even to the point of being chained like a criminal."  he loves because he is loved.
 
At some point, says St. Bernard, a person may reach the fourth degree of love.  It may not happen in this lifetime, but eventually the person will be made complete in this love, either in this life or the next.  And what is this state of love?  It's when things come full circle, and people learn to love themselves for the sake of God!  It's at that point that a person understands that they are actually a temple of God, that God abides within them, and they abide in God. 
 
As Jesus taught us, "the kingdom of God is within you."  We pray daily through the words of the Lord's Prayer: "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."  This is accomplished by us becoming like God, and living as though God were working through us. Saint Teresa of Avila said it well when she wrote, “Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion is to look out to the world. Yours are the feet with which Christ is to go about doing good.”
 
This is the fourth degree of love.  Realizing that we are all one family, all brothers and sisters, under One God, our Parent.  We learn, because of this interconnectedness, that what affects one of us, affects all of us to some degree.  As St. Paul writes in I Corinthians 12, "If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it." 
 
Ten lepers were healed, but only one of them was on the path to being made "well."  Jesus recognized the difference between being healed (physically), and being well (spiritually).  The one leper was now on the path through the degrees of love, on the path to being human, on the path to becoming whole, to becoming an instrument of God here on earth. 
 
We approach this wholeness, this humanness, when we come to learn about who we really are as individuals, what unique gifts we have been given – regardless of how small or large we think they are – and how to use them in the place where we have been planted.  If each person does this, then the individual people become the whole united family.