Loved First: When the Image Learns to Live
Thursday after Epiphany - 1 John 4:19–5:4
“We love because he loved us first” (1 Jn 4:19).
Scripture dares to say that every human being is created in tselem and demut—the image and likeness of God. Yet the same word, tselem, can also name an idol. That overlap is unsettling. It tells us that being an image is not automatically a blessing. It is a vocation—and therefore a risk.
When love collapses, the image does not disappear; it hardens. God does not cease to exist—but God becomes invisible.
The First Letter of John presses this truth further, not by lowering the demand of love, but by uncovering its source. Love, John insists, does not begin with effort, virtue, or moral resolve. It begins with being loved. “We love because he loved us first.”
This is not sentiment. For John, it is sacramental fact.
Faith and love are inseparable because both are born in baptism. To believe that Jesus is the Christ is to be reborn “of water and Spirit,” incorporated into a new family where God is Father and believers are brothers and sisters. Love of one another is not an abstract humanitarian ideal; it is the concrete expression of a shared new birth. Before we are asked to recognize the image of God in others, we ourselves have been named, claimed, and re-created.
This is why John’s language is uncompromising. “Whoever says, ‘I love God,’ and hates a brother or sister, is a liar.”
The logic is simple and severe. God is invisible. The human person is visible. Love of God can be tested only where God’s image stands before us. To refuse love here is not merely an ethical failure; it is a denial of what baptism claims to have brought into being.
This baptismal love once unsettled and quietly transformed the Roman world. People with no reason to belong together—slave and free, Jew and Greek, rich and poor—lived as family. Observers were baffled. Look how they love one another, they said—not because Christians were unusually kind, but because they crossed boundaries the empire itself could not heal. Love made the invisible God visible.
And then something broke.
What began as communion fractured into rival identities. Confession hardened into ideology. Loyalty to Christ was absorbed into loyalty to faction, nation, or doctrine. The baptized learned to see one another not as brothers and sisters, but as threats to be defeated. The sword was raised where bread had once been broken. Christianity did not abandon love; it narrowed it—restricting it to those who looked, believed, or belonged in the “right” way.
In that moment, John’s warning proved prophetic. When love of the brother collapses, faith itself becomes questionable —not because God ceases to be real, but because God is rendered invisible once again.
To recover John’s vision today is not to retreat into nostalgia, but to let love widen without losing its depth. If baptism creates a family, then the God who loved us first cannot be confined to its visible borders. Here the Church is invited to risk what Pope Francis keeps placing before the world: to see every person as brother or sister—not by sentiment, but by creation; not by ideology, but by shared vulnerability.
If such love were lived, the world would look strange again. And perhaps then—not puzzled pagans, but the angels of God—would dare to wonder:
Look how they love one another.
Scripture Attribution
New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright © 1989, 1993
the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of
Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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