We Have Believed in Love

Wednesday after Epiphany

 


There is a phrase we hear quite often—sometimes said with irony, sometimes with sadness, and almost always with weariness:
“I’m never falling in love again.”

It is said by people who have loved and been hurt.
By people who trusted and were disappointed.
By people who once believed in love… and stopped believing.

That phrase does not speak of a lack of feeling.
It speaks of fear.
Fear of being vulnerable again.
Fear of suffering again.
Fear of believing again.

And it is precisely there that today’s Scripture confronts us with a simple and profound statement:
“We have come to know the love God has for us, and we have believed in that love.”

Saint John does not say, we have understood love,
or we have explained love,
or we have earned love.
He says: we have believed.

To believe in love is not naïve.
It is a deliberate choice.
It is the decision not to live locked inside mistrust.
It is the courage to remain open, even knowing that loving always involves risk.

Very often, when someone says, “I’m never falling in love again,” what they are really saying is:
“I don’t want to suffer again.”
But the Gospel proposes something deeper: not allowing fear to rule our lives.

God does not ask us to believe in an idealized or romantic love.
He invites us to believe in His love—
a love that does not run away when it hurts,
that does not withdraw when it is rejected,
that remains even when it is not returned.

That is why Saint John can say so clearly:
“God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God, and God in him.”
Not the one who has never been wounded,
but the one who chooses to remain.

And at the end of the reading comes one of the most liberating lines in all of Scripture:
“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.”

John is not saying that true love does not suffer.
He is saying that it no longer lives under the control of fear.

Fear appears when we think everything depends on us,
when we believe that losing love means losing everything.
But the one who has believed in God’s love knows something different:
that their worth does not depend on success,
that their dignity does not depend on being accepted,
that their life is not at stake every time they love.

That is why the text continues:
“Fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not yet reached perfection in love.”
Fear makes us live as if every mistake were a sentence.
But God’s love does not punish.
It sustains.
It restores.
It allows us to begin again.

That love does not erase our scars,
but it takes away their power.
It does not remove pain,
but it removes fear’s dominion.

And that is why—Saint John tells us—love reaches its fullness when we can face the future with calm confidence,
even the day of judgment.

Because the one who has believed in love learns to live as Jesus lived:
with an open heart,
with trust in the Father,
without allowing fear to have the final word.

Christian faith is not repeating, “I will never fall in love again.”
It is daring to say, even with scars and wounds:

“We have believed in love.”

And in that love…
there is no fear.

 

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