True Love Means Being Able to Choose

14 September 2025  John 3:13-17

Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

“For God so loved the world….” John 3:16

In the book of Job Satan challenges God, saying something like this: “You admire Job the way you admire a chair you have made – he’s quite beautiful, but you no more have a relationship with him than you do with your furniture. Will you let Job be truly free to choose you, absent the incentives to good behavior? Will you dare to see if Job will choose the good simply because it is good? Are you willing to take the chance that Job might choose the path of least resistance?” The choices Satan dares God with are the terms of every real relationship. They are the preconditions for all authentic integrity. Apart from these choices there are no relationships, but only varying degrees of manipulation. Apart from these choices, there is no integrity, but only factory-formatted hard drives where souls ought to be. To have a real relationship, God must leave Job free to inflict and experience pain.

Suffering is the great test of freedom. Will we choose the good even when all the incentives to do good have vanished?

God did not need to create the universe. God isn’t any greater because we exist, or because the universe exists. He created the universe simply as a vessel to pour His love into, and to be such a universe all its people have to be free. A universe made as a vessel for divine love cannot have people unable to say no. The effort it takes to sustain such a universe in love stretches even the muscles of God. At the end of the book of Job God asks Job, “Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook, or press down its tongue with a cord? Can you put a rope in its nose, or pierce its jaw with a hook?” (41:1-2). The implied answer to this question is that God can’t either. God has to contend with evil in this universe which He made to contain His love, and must do it without violating human freedom. It isn’t easy, not even for God. The witness of the New Testament is that God came in person to proclaim love, resist evil, and invite the world to come to Him. When we see it is God stretched out on the cross, we see that God has committed His whole life and power to this universe and its people. He still does, and He places that love and power, all of it, in our hands every day, at every Mass.

Some days the choice for God seems so easy. Everything is alive with love and hope, our prayers are quick and full, and the words of scripture leap off the page and wrap themselves around us, strengthening us in ways that go way past just words. Other days are bleak, sorry, and mean. Every face is turned away, every hand raised against us, and the words of scripture just lie there on the page. God will not violate our freedom to reform us. God beckons instead, sometimes across a wasteland, asking us to choose Him anyway simply because He is good, the only good, because He is goodness itself, because He is love itself.

In the end, Job understood that. In God’s mercy, perhaps we will, too.