18th Sunday of Ordinary Time, A August 2, 2026
Fr. Alexander Albert St. Mary Magadalen, Abbeville, LA
“If you love me, then you would…” We all have experiences of people who claim to love us but then fail to act like it. We have all said we love and then failed to live it. It’s not about putting conditions on love, but there is room for putting conditions on believing someone when they claim to love us. When that claim does not match their actions they either lied to us, didn’t understand what they promised, or allowed some other thing to displace their love. The messiness of life rightly makes us wary of taking someone’s word when they say they love us. The problem is that we tend to put an “if, then” on God’s love.
Writing to the Romans, St. Paul says that neither “anguish, nor distress, nor persecution, nor famine, nor nakedness, nor peril, nor the sword,” that “neither death, nor life… will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” People often use that passage to reassure us of God’s power, but I’m not convinced that it’s the question most people have. If someone accepts the idea that God exists then they usually go right along with the idea that that God is all powerful and nothing could stop him. Indeed, Atheists will even grant his godly power for the sake of argument, but then go on to use that very idea of an unstoppable God in the face of all the evil in the world to defend their belief that God does not exist.
So, let’s interpret Paul’s claim that nothing can separate us from God’s love alongside what Paul said last week: “all things work for good for those who love God.” Paul’s conviction is not only that God can overcome things like death and angels and every other creature but that he does in fact always love us regardless of those other things.
To put it simply, when God says he loves us unconditionally, he means it; it is true. When we shake our fist at God or cry out desperately or use cold logic to say to him “if you love me, God, then you will…” – we are setting ourselves up for failure. How? Because everything is an expression of God’s love. To demand God love us in the way we expect is a problem not because it harms God, but because it closes our minds and hearts to the truth. It makes false assumptions about God and love.
It’s a bit like saying “if water is wet, then prove it by putting out the sun.” Even if you could splash water on the sun, it wouldn’t work the same way it does when you splash a campfire. Both the sun and the campfire are “burning,” but in radically different ways. The sun’s nuclear reaction would shred water molecules into particles just at it does with any other substance. But if you have already made up your mind that the only way to prove water is wet is if it can extinguish the sun, you will struggle to see the truth.
The key to recognizing God’s love, therefore, is not to set up a bunch of conditions for God to meet, but instead to learn to observe and correctly interpret how he loves us. I used the hypothetical example of splashing water on the sun. If you simply observe what happens instead of setting conditions on what you want to prove, then you can actually learn more about water and the sun. Unlike the sun or water, God knows us and knows how easily we mistrust and misunderstand him.
This is the reason for the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of His Son, Jesus Christ. As a human being, Jesus knows what it’s like to gradually build up trust with other people so that they believe him when he claims to love them. Thirty years in Nazareth. Three years with the disciples. He takes the time to invest deeply, develop rapport, and prove his love to the few closest to him.
Today’s gospel starts with John the Baptist. John is Jesus’ cousin, born just six months before he was. Besides the unrecorded ways John and Jesus must have interacted, we see their exchanges at the Jordan river and here. Jesus immediately seeks solitude and prayer in response to the news that his cousin is dead. He is clearly grieving the death of his cousin and people only grieve what they love. Indeed, grief is the evidence of love in the face of loss.
His love is not only for his cousin, though. This crowd of strangers heartlessly intrudes upon his moment of grief, but instead of being hardened by grief, his never-failing love stirs his heart with pity. So Jesus loves the crowd through healing the sick and miraculously providing food. He loves his disciples by giving them the chance to participate in this act of divine love even though he doesn’t need to.
These are all signs of love, which should alert us to the deeper reality at play. Jesus has the power to cure and multiply food. Surely he could have prevented John the Baptist’s death, right? Yes. Why didn’t he? Because he loves John. Allowing him to be beheaded is part of his love. He doesn’t want him to die and he doesn’t cause him to die, but he allows it for the same reason he does anything: love.
This is hard for human beings to accept. “How can a loving God allow evil? If he loves us, then surely he would…” what, do what we think is best? This is the temptation to Jesus on the cross. “Save yourself, if you are the Son of God, [and] come down from the cross” (Mt 27:40). In other words, prove your love by our standards, not your own.
There is an answer, you know. To that question: “How can a loving God allow evil?” God is all-powerful and all-knowing. He can see how allowing – allowing, not causing – this evil now means he can lead us to a greater good later. We rarely see that greater good in the moment, though, so knowing the answer and accepting the answer are different things. Accepting the claim that God will bring a greater good out of some immense tragedy requires an incredible amount of trust. Believing that God loves me while in the midst of horrendous pain which I know God could stop… it’s a supernatural kind of trust.
It is indeed supernatural, but it’s not contrary to nature. It’s beyond our ability to understand, but not incompatible with reason. God does give us a reason to trust him, to make that act of faith: Jesus. Jesus loves us un ways that make sense to us – food and healing and even hugs – but then asks us to trust him when he says that the darker moments – suffering, defeat, and death – are also love. He does not leave us without evidence, though. He asks us to trust the love in the pain and then himself goes through the pain of the cross while clinging to the conviction of his father’s love for him.
So look to the cross, then! Ask your questions, express your honest thoughts, feelings, and desires to God in a raw and brutal prayer. Only… do it with the cross, knowing God is not the one on trial here. It is our own hearts that need conviction, to be convinced that nothing separates us from the love of God… that asking God to love us the way we think he should love us is asking love to stop being love, for God is unchanging and he cannot help but love at all times in all things.
Paul says that no “other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” No other creature, but there is still the one who can: ourselves. The one and only thing that can separate us from the love of God is our own choice. Though our sins do not stop God from loving us, they do set us apart from that love. For God loves us enough not to force us to accept what he freely offers.
By God’s grace, then, never separate yourself from Him who is love itself! Embrace fully the goal of a living faith: transform your challenge to God from – “if you love me, you would” – to the truer claim, “because you love me, I will… no longer ‘spend [my] money for what is not bread;’ I will… no longer spend my ‘wages for what fails to satisfy.’ Because you love me, I will… ‘come to [you] heedfully… that [I] may have life’ even in the face of ‘anguish, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, [and] peril…’ life even in the face of death itself.”