God is Love

Love, this perplexing and difficult something at the heart of our faith is both the best description we have been given of who God is and the clearest command our Lord gives to us. It’s a quality or a type of relationship, and it’s proclaimed as the greatest, strongest, and most persistent gift we are given.

It’s what St John talks about in chapter 14 of his Gospel. The English translation of the Greek is “love” and that’s really a pity.  The early church was one step ahead of us. The early church knew that this difficult and perplexing quality of relationship was something new, revealed by Jesus and in Jesus. So they invented a new word. The church took a seldom used, obscure Greek term and used it to describe this new state.  The Greek word, we all know, is Agape.

The advantage of doing this was that every time the Church used this word, people would know exactly what was being talked about—they would know that what was meant was the command of Christ, the life of God and a new way of being.

We haven’t been so perceptive. We took that precise and specific Greek word “Agape”, and we ended up translating it as one of the most vague, most misused and abused words in the English language. We call it “love”, a word with a host of meanings. So, most of the time when we hear the word “love” used in the Bible we think we know what it means. But we almost certainly don’t. Instead, we’re probably confusing agape with one of those other things that the word “love” means in English.

So we hear Jesus saying, “If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father” and we actually think we understand what Jesus is talking about. After all, we love our new car; and we love chocolate; and we love our spouses and our children; we love to go for a walk. Romeo loved Juliet. And none of that has any real connection to what John is talking about when he says that God is Love, or with what Jesus is commanding us to do when he commands us to love him or one another. When we love in any of those other ways we are not keeping Jesus’ commandment, we are not imitating the nature of God.

The word is a problem. The King James Version of the Bible generally used “charity” instead. But, for better or worse, “charity” got taken over by non profit making bodies and really doesn’t work these days. We’re stuck with “love,” but I wish we weren’t.

All of this is to say that when we hear the word “love” used by and about Jesus Christ, God, and the Christian community, we cannot automatically assume we know what it means. Ordinary English usage seldom gives us even a hint of what the Bible is talking about. Yet this peculiar difficult and perplexing thing is both the purpose of our lives and the way to that purpose.

There is only one way to learn what the Christian faith is talking about when it talks about love. There is only one way to discover which of all the different experiences we have are really experiences of love in this sense. There is only one way to know what we are commanded to do when we are commanded by our Lord to love God and one another. WWe can learn of love – Christian love, agape – only from Jesus Christ.It’s only from knowing him: from knowing what he said and what he did, who he was and who he is, that we can know what love is. Until we realize this we will always miss the point. The call to love is a call to Jesus: to know him, to live his life, and to walk his path. You see, the truth of the matter is that there is no single, precise, definition of Christian love, of agape. There is, instead, a person, Jesus of Nazareth, who lives it and who shows us what it is and who gives it to us that we may show and give that same love to the world.

We know that it looks like a father welcoming home a son who was lost; like paying a full
day’s wage to a worker who showed up an hour before finishing time—and it looks like rejoicing in each of these. It looks like losing your life in the hope of finding it;  It looks like all of that, and much, much more. But really, finally, and at its clearest, it looks like this. It looks like a cross—it looks like the cross. This is what we Christians really mean when we talk about love. And if we ever mean anything else, then we most certainly mean something less—and we are unfaithful to Jesus.This cross is what it means for God to love us; this is what it means for us to love one another.

That’s really the central thing I have to say about love. So, to find out what John means when he says that God is love, or to discover what it looks like to love one another as Jesus has loved us, we don’t  look deep within our selves, we don’t look around us, or at our families, or at our society or at the natural world. Instead, we look to Jesus and to his life—to all of his life. There we will find, in all its depth and simplicity, what we Christians really mean when we talk about love. And there we will find life.