Love in Eternity; Love born in the World

Adrienne von Speyr, whom I introduced in my previous post, wrote a 4-volume series of meditations on the Gospel of John that run to 1,600 pages! The following excerpts are from her meditation on verse 18:37 – For this I was born… – when Jesus faced Pilate. These thoughts, born out of prayer and contemplation of divine truth, are beautiful and profound, and need no commentary by me. (John, Volume 4, pages 60-61. Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1991) 

For this I was born. Namely, in order to be King. He is King through his birth, because he is born out of love and love is the ground of his birth. . . . His whole Kingdom is love in eternity, and love existed already in eternity; it was realized in the relationship of the Trinity. Now, however, it is clarified and expanded by the world’s being drawn into this love. Thus love, which existed already, is born once again. And this birth of love is love in a double sense: it is this as birth out of God because the birth derives from the redemptive decision by Father and Son, and it is this as birth out of the Mother, who, in her word of affirmation, simultaneously affirms the Son and the love of God. She sees in God a livingness of love such as to enable this love to bring the Son in the Mother to the world.

As one face of the Son is turned toward God and the other toward the world, so he is supported in the world by the love of God and the love of the Mother. Without being thus supported through love, his earthly life would be impossible. That the love of the Father supports him we understand in faith. However, that the Mother supports him in love, that he has to be supported by the love of a human being – that is something that we do not think of. And yet: that at his birth he received a response from the world to his question of love for love – this was the precondition for his birth. To his question, the Mother answers with Yes. She says Yes to the love of the Father and of the Son.

He is born as the Son of the Mother; of a Mother who gives birth in extremest poverty in a stable because the entire Kingdom of her Son is of heaven and unfolds from within heaven, including the events of his birth and his kingship.