"God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not be lost but may have eternal life.
"For God sent his Son into the world not to condemn the world but so that through him the world might be saved." (St John 3: 16). These are wonderful lines of hope. Anyone who sits down and reads tomorrow's Gospel (John 3: 14 - 21) has to be filled with hope and a realisation that all love and salvation is to be found in the triune God.
All our love is a shadow, a fleeting glimpse of God's love. And every time we engage in a loving act we are getting closer to God, and making God more present and real in our world.
But we also read in tomorrow's Gospel "that though the light has come into the world, men have shown they prefer darkness to the light because their deeds were evil. And everyone who does wrong hates the light and avoids it, for fear his actions should be exposed, but the man who lives by the truth, comes out into the light, so that it may be plainly seen that what he does is done in God." (St John 3: 19 - 21).
That we can succumb to wrongdoing is made abundantly clear in the reading from the Second Book of Chronicles, which will be read tomorrow in church.
"All the heads of the priesthood, and the people too, added infidelity to infidelity, copying all the practices of the nations and defiling the Temple that the Lord had consecrated for himself in Jerusalem." In that same chapter we read, "But they ridiculed the messengers of God, they despised his words." (2 Chronicles 36: 16).
Ireland has been inundated with acts of terrible violence in recent weeks. We have had a spate of horrible murders, people are being slaughtered on our roads in an almost daily routine.
The misuse of drugs and alcohol is playing a significant role in brutalising far too many of our people.
After every act of violence there is a cry for more police on our streets, longer prison sentences and the need for tougher laws. But all of that is short-term thinking. Brute force is never the solution to any problem.
We talk about cherishing all the children of the nation. Unfortunately, far too many of our children are not "cherished". Far too many of our children are not loved. Far too many have no alternative but to feel unloved and marginalised. And it is in that environment that we create the well-spring of our problems.
Perfect love is only to be found in God but we can begin to bring about God's love in our world.
The triune God is a loving God, who wants us all to be caught up in a world of love.
While the notion of the Trinity is ultimately a mystery it is interesting to see that God is made up of a community of persons.
We are asked to be God-like. Surely one of the ways in reaching that goal is by our living in community with one another. And that involves us playing an active part in making sure that all our children are cherished.
Rather than having more gardaí on the streets and more prisons in the country, it would make far more sense to have more schools with more teachers and more creches, especially in areas which are in need of such facilities.
It's easy to shout for more police and more draconian laws. It makes far more sense to build up a caring community. We have the resources.
The God of love became man out of an act of supreme love for us.
Christianity is about loving God and loving our neighbour. It is most unlikely that people who know they are loved will ever be involved in violent crime.
In an interview in 1996 that German journalist Peter Seewald did with the then Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, he asked him what God really wants of us.
Ratzinger replied, "That we become loving persons, for then we are his images. For he is, as St John tells us, love itself, and he wants there to be creatures who are similar to him and who thus, out of the freedom of their own loving, become like him and belong to his company and thus, as it were, spread the radiance that is his."
When we show love to one another, we are also expressing our love for God. We are growing closer to God. And God in turn will reward us with eternal life.
And in the meantime God's love can transform us and our world.
M.C.