'And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord's holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge - that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
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God is love! This is a statement that few of us would dispute, but the phrase is so familiar; its three short syllables trip so easily off the tongue, that we can easily overlook what a profound reality it expresses. Perhaps this is why, when he wrote to the Christians in Ephesus, the apostle Paul chose to communicate this in a quite deliberate and measured way. We are invited to stop and take in the height, the depth, the length and the breadth of God's love - this is far more than giving it a passing acknowledgement.
Paul goes so far as to suggest that we will never seriously encounter the scale and extent of God's love without some help! He prays that we may be infused with power; a power he has already identified as having its source in God's Spirit. Yet his prayer is not that we might be therefore equipped to work some astounding miracle, withstand or challenge some great earthly force, but so that we might be equipped to fulfil this task of encountering, experiencing and receiving God's love.
This is another invitation that flies in the face of the narratives of today's world. It is a world where masses of data can be transferred across thousands of miles in a matter of milli-seconds. Yet the simple reality of God's love requires time, effort and attention if we are to truly begin to make sense of it. If you want to see how deep something is, you have to look down. This means in that moment, you cannot look up and see how high it is. This prayer encourages us to pause; to ponder; to linger; to absorb - and we choose to do so in a world that all too often wants to rush us on, become more efficient, complete and finish.
When we accept God's invitation to be still, we grasp the opportunity to discover more of who our God is. In those moments, our world may not change, but our understanding of what goes on within it might. Advent invites us to acknowledge the darkness that surrounds us, but to do so confident that it will always be dwarfed by the measure of God's love. Our understanding of God is not limited by what there is to discover, but the time that we invest in seeking it out.
Infinite God, may the pace and pressure of this world never deny me the time I need to discover more of who you are. AMEN
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