Those who live in love live in God, and God lives in them. 1 John 4:16

February is few people’s favourite month, but it does contain a favourite date. Halfway through the month, on the 14th, it‘s Valentine’s Day. It is, of course, beloved of the greeting card industry, which rates it nowadays as rivalling birthdays and Christmas in retail sales. But it is also cherished by millions of romantically inclined men and women, otherwise totally sane, who take the opportunity each February to post a message of love in the hope that it will be reciprocated.
As the card is meant to be anonymous, this can lead to all manner of tricky misunderstandings, but hope springs eternal, and many a teenage heart has missed a beat or two on the morning of Valentine’s Day. And for all I know, there may be millions of couples all over the world who owe their happy marriages to one of these heart-strewn, beribboned cards with their doggerel protestations of undying love. Readers of the Door in that happy position might care to let us know.
Few of those who send or receive Valentines realise that 14 February is actually the feast day of St Valentine. That’s hardly surprising, as we know very little about the person the day is supposed to commemorate. In fact, there were two Christian martyrs of that name, both living in the third century, one a soldier and the other a bishop. Nobody knows for sure which of them is the one honoured in the Calendar, and no one has ever successfully found any link at all between either of them and courting couples and their desperate hopes.
The most likely explanation of the association of this date with hopeful lovers is a very old tradition (at least as old as Chaucer) that birds begin to pair on 14 February - St Valentine’s Day. As they noisily go about choosing their mates, young men and women could pursue a rather subtler, if more circuitous route to the same end.
Whatever its provenance, Valentine’s Day at least reminds us of the irresistible force of love. ‘Love changes everything’, as the song says - or, as the Beatles put it, ‘All you need is love’. The problem then becomes interpretation. In English the one word ‘love’ covers everything, from sexual intercourse to motherly care, from close friendship to a lifelong partnership. Happily, the Greeks have more than one word for it. So the New Testament is able to establish that eros (sexual attraction), philadelphia (friendship) and agape (sacrificial love) are distinct qualities, yet all are part of the mysterious and wonderful chemistry of human love in its fullest sense.
‘All that I am I give to you’, the couple say to each other in the wedding service. What a thing to promise! And yet what a testimony to the deepest possible understanding of the love of God for us, and (in our better moments) of human love in all its tenderness, commitment and unselfishness. This is a million miles away from ‘I love you and I want you and I’m going to have you’, which appears to be a fairly common message in the cruder kind of Valentine cards. This is not about taking or demanding, but self-giving.
So here is the divine mathematics of love. Physical attraction plus true friendship plus self-giving love add up to - well, everything that the Bible means when it says that ‘those who live in love live in God, and God lives in them’. Happy Valentine’s Day!
Canon David Winter is a former Diocesan Adviser on Evangelism, former BBC head of religious affairs, a broadcaster and author of many books. www.davidwinter-author.co.uk