AT THE RISK of losing all credibility with some of my readers, I’ll admit it: I can be a sucker for the typical romantic comedy storyline. Boy meets girl and they fall in love. Then, through a series of mishaps or misunderstandings, boy loses girl. But somehow, they find each other again, rekindle their love, and (presumably) live happily ever after. There are endless variations on the details, but you can see the same basic plot elements play out again and again from one film to the next, especially if you binge-watch the Hallmark Channel (don’t think I didn’t notice). The trick is to not be too obvious about it, and to have relatable characters the audience can care about.

That, however, is what makes the 2001 film Serendipity such a puzzle to me. I can’t decide if it (a) aspires to be the sappiest rom-com ever made, (b) is satirically taking things to extremes to make fun of the whole genre, or (c) is trying to do a bit of both. It’s as if to say, “Yes, we know we’re being super obvious about all the rom-com stereotypes. We’re going to exaggerate the story just to make a point: we can tug your heart strings even when you know we’re doing it.” If you haven’t seen the movie and are curious about it, judge for yourself. But fair warning: many of my students found the film annoying when I required them to watch it as part of a class on narrative.

The screenwriters go all in on the idea of romantic destiny: if you have a soulmate, fate will bring you together. It’s as if the two romantic leads are guided by an invisible hand. That vague sense of transcendence is further heightened by setting the story against the backdrop of Christmas. Watching the movie, you can know you’re being played and still be drawn in. You can still be moved by the moment that the characters are reunited by Destiny with a capital D.

What producers bank on with films like this is the assumption that to some extent, as a culture, we are in love with love. Well, romantic love anyway. It’s estimated, for example, that over $25 billion was spent in the United States on Valentines Day in 2024. And when I think of the pop love songs that played over the radio when I was a kid, I can see now how they routinely used the language of worship. Any of you around my age will probably remember the 1977 Bee Gees classic “How Deep is Your Love” from the movie Saturday Night Fever. The song contains these lyrics: “I believe in you / You know the door to my very soul / You’re the light in my deepest, darkest hour / You’re my savior when I fall.”

That’s a lyric that would be right at home in a contemporary worship service.

Whether we know it or not, who or what we love most truly is often what we worship. Indeed, we might go as far as to say that pop culture holds up romantic love as a god. Have we internalized any of these ideas or values ourselves? That’s not to say that the Bible knows nothing of romance; think of the Song of Songs, for example, or the courtship of Isaac and Rebekah. But the word “love” brings so much cultural baggage with it that we would be wise to keep this in mind when we read John’s letters. John, of course, does not say that love is a god to be worshiped. But what does he mean when he says that the God we worship is love?

ALL OF US use the word “love” so easily in everyday conversation. We “love” our children, but also our cats and dogs, whom we treat like children. We “love” pizza, hanging out with friends, and watching our favorite sports team play and win. In every case, we’re describing some kind of positive emotional experience whose intensity may vary tremendously from situation to situation and person to person.

But as far as I know, no one has ever been able to define love without remainder. No one has written the definitive treatise that will satisfy everyone and end the debates for all time. We need a whole variety of voices: philosophers, poets, neuroscientists.

And…apostles. John isn’t writing as a poet or philosopher. And although his words have theological significance, he’s not writing a theological essay about love either. He’s a pastor, writing a letter to a confused congregation. Here are what I suspect are the two best known verses in 1 John:

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. (1 John 4:7-8, NIV)

If you recall, this is not the first time he’s spoken of love in the letter. It’s not even the first time he’s referred to Jesus’ commandment to love one another, so everything he says here needs to be understood in that larger context. He’s already made love the mark of true discipleship, to help comfort his readers in the wake of the controversy that left people wondering who the real Christians were. Who really knows God? Who is truly a child of God, someone born of God? Only those who love their brothers and sisters, and show that love in a practical way, John has already insisted.

But why is love a mark of discipleship? Because it comes from God. As Jesus taught, love is what shows a family resemblance to our Father as God’s children. And why does love come from God? Because love is of the very nature of God. God is love.

This is not simply to say that God is “loving,” though that is in fact true. Nor is John saying that God is basically a romantic at heart. The limitation of both these ways of thinking is that it reads human conceptions of love back into God, in a way that could potentially distort the truth.

That said, we also have to make peace with the limitations of language itself, or even of our ability as creatures to understand our Creator. If we can’t agree on what human love is, we shouldn’t expect to know all there is to know about divine love either. We may not consider ourselves to be poets, but when speaking of God, all of our language is to some extent a matter of analogy and metaphor.

We just need to get the logic the right way around. When we say that God is “holy,” for example, we don’t simply start with some human definition of holiness and read that back into the divine nature. We need the word “holy” to mark the fact that God is different from us in ways we can’t fully grasp and can only understand by virtue of what God reveals to us.

When John says that God is love, therefore, he doesn’t mean that God is a romantic, or likes puppies and pizza. It’s a way of saying that anything we might call by the name of “love” is at best a pale shadow of God’s character. Only God is love; the rest of us can only be imitators.

And as we’ll see, that’s exactly what John is calling us to do.