The Theological Virtues: Love

The scriptures referred to are Philippians 2:5-11 and Mark 15:1-39.

C.S. Lewis pointed out that the Greeks had more words for love than we do in English. In his book The Four Loves, he examines their words for family love, friendship, romantic love and divine love. The distinctions between the various kinds of love are important. Just this week my newsfeed kept offering me the tawdry story of a woman arrested for marrying her daughter. It turns out she was previously married to her son! That is a confusion of two very different kinds of love, a distinction almost all religions and cultures uphold. On another front, it is not uncommon for men to mistake friendship with a woman as an invitation to romantic love. And occasionally a woman thinks a man who is friendly wants to take the relationship to a different level. Sometimes that works out; sometimes the person pushing to make the friendship into a romance is seriously misreading signals. The 4 loves are generally distinct. Since we are speaking of love as a virtue, we are going to be concentrating on agape, the kind of love we find in God. But as Jesus compared heavenly things to earthly things by way of analogy and parable, we will be referring to the other loves in order to illustrate divine love.

And we are in good company. Scripture does the same thing. God is depicted as a loving parent, as a boon companion, and even as a husband to Israel. As with all metaphors and similes, we are not to take them beyond the things they are trying to illustrate. All such analogies break down if you try to overextend them. But lets look to see what specific qualities each comparison is trying to bring out.

God is called Father hundreds of times in the Bible, in both the Old and New Testaments. This is understood as a metaphor, because he is not biologically our father. But the title indicates that God is not remote or uninterested in his creatures. He loves us, protects us, listens to us, gives us our daily bread and disciplines us when necessary as a father would. There are a few places where God is compared to a mother (Deuteronomy 32:18; Isaiah 49:15; 66:13) but I think the Hebrews generally shied away from that language because of the abundance of goddesses and fertility religions around them. God has no wife, nor does he comport himself like the lustful pagan gods, going after anything female. Again the Hebrews were interested in the nonsexual aspects of fatherhood, the parental functions God fulfilled. They pictured God as strict but loving, a strong protector of his people. You see this in places where God is called “a father to the fatherless, a defender of widows.” (Psalm 68:5) In the culture of the time, they were the least powerful and most vulnerable members of society. God steps in and tells his people that such persons are the recipients of his special attention, so they had better not mistreat or cheat them.

God is spoken of as friend less often than he is as Father. In Jeremiah 3:4 God is called, “My Father, my friend from my youth...” In the book of James it says of Abraham, “he was called God's friend.” (James 2:23) More often Jesus is spoken of as a friend to us. Jesus himself says, “No one has greater love than this—that one lays down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I no longer call you slaves, because the slave does not understand what his master is doing. But I have called you friends, because I have revealed to you everything I heard from my Father.” (John 15:13-15) Jesus also addresses the fact that his critics called him “a friend of tax collectors and sinners.” (Matthew 11:19) He doesn't deny it.

But what does it mean that God is our friend? Let's look at what the Bible says about friendship. Proverbs says, “...there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.” (Proverbs 18:24) It also says, “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.” (Proverbs 17:17) We also distinguish between “fair weather friends” and those who are always there for you. Ecclesiastes describes friendship thus: “Two people are better than one, because they can reap more benefit from their labor. For if they fall, one will help his companion up, but pity the person who falls down and has no one to help him up. Furthermore, if two lie down together, they can keep each other warm, but how can one person keep warm by himself? Although an assailant may overpower one person, two can withstand him. Moreover, a three-stranded cord is not quickly broken.” (Ecclesiastes 4:9-12) So if God is our friend, we can count on him to have our back, to help us up when we fall, to comfort and to protect us.

One other metaphor for how God loves us is as a husband, primarily in Jeremiah and Hosea. Again this is not to imply anything sexual about God but to compare the love and commitment of God to Israel to that of a faithful husband. Indeed in Hosea, we see him pictured as an extraordinarily committed and loving husband, seeking out and willing to take back his unfaithful wife. Adultery becomes a metaphor for Israel's idolatry. Going after other gods is like taking on lovers. Hosea uses his own unhappy marriage as an enacted parable to illustrate this. Yet as Hosea does for his wife, God is always willing to forgive and take his straying people back. This metaphor for God's love tells us that God is committed to us and faithful in his love for us and that, although we are to be as committed and as faithful to him, yet he is willing to forgive and welcome the sinner.

Those are how scripture uses images of things we know to explain aspects of God's love to us. But there is one aspect of God's love that is very hard to explain. And that is just how giving God is.

In pagan times you were always giving gifts to gods and making sacrifices to keep their favor. At the early stages, there was no reason to think Yahweh was different. All of his life Abraham wanted a son and heir. When in his extreme old age, God grants him his son Isaac, Abraham is happy. And then God asks him the unthinkable: to sacrifice this son. This was not unheard of. We know that human sacrifice was practiced by practically all early peoples, to either appease the gods or to insure fertility of the land. In Mesopotamia, where Abraham came from, a human or animal would be sacrificed and laid in the foundation of a house or building to protect it from evil spirits. Child sacrifice was practiced by the Phoenicians and the Arameans. The practice would be repeatedly condemned in the law of Moses and by the prophets. But this predates all that. So this would seem to be something a god might ask of you. And Abraham ultimately proves willing to go through with it. But at the last moment God stops him and provides a ram as a substitute sacrifice. By this act, God shows that he will never ask his followers to sacrifice their children to him. And he shows that if a sacrifice is needed, he will provide it. God is a giver.

While animal sacrifice was quite common in the ancient world, substituting an animal for a human was not. The idea that something or someone else could be sacrificed in your place was unique to the Hebrews.

This principle is reinforced in the Exodus. The Israelites were to kill lambs and smear their blood on the doorposts of their homes so that their firstborn would be spared from death which would pass over them. Moreover this is the event that leads to God's people being freed from slavery, and eventually coming to the promised land. This is the pivotal event of the Hebrew faith and the basis of the covenant between God and the people of Israel.

A millennium and a half later, Jesus repurposes elements of the Passover meal to symbolize his sacrifice. He calls the unleavened bread his body and the wine his blood. He dies as the nation is sacrificing its lambs for the Passover. His death frees God's people from their enslavement to sin and lets us enter the kingdom of God. God giving his son to save us is the basis of the new covenant between God and all humans who turn to him.

But, while, as Paul points out, someone might give his life to save a good man, Jesus died for us while we were still sinners. (Romans 5:6-8) Jesus dies even before his own disciples can grasp the idea. It isn't until after his resurrection that the disciples get it.

But what Jesus reveals about God's love is unique. Unlike the love of a friend, or a father or a husband, we don't see much in the way of this kind of love. The closest would be that rare person who donates one of his or her kidneys to a stranger who needs one. Even so, a person can live with just one healthy kidney. What Jesus did is more analogous to that of donating a heart, which requires the death of the donor. But people don't do that voluntarily. As I said, Jesus is unique. In fact he has become the archetype of self-sacrificial love.

When we speak of love as a virtue, agape, we are talking about this kind of self-giving love. It is, as C.S. Lewis points out, not a love born out of need, such as our love for our parents. Generally speaking, we need our parents. As infants and small children we would die without them. As it is children raised without love grow up psychologically damaged, such as those who grew up in Soviet-era Romanian orphanages, where only physical needs were met. Nor is it love that feels like a need, such as erotic love. Strictly speaking, sex is not a need for the individual, only for the species as a whole. But it sure feels like a need, especially when you are young.

Rabbi Abraham Twerski has another word for this kind of need love; he calls it fish love. When you say you love fish, and by that you mean you love to eat them, you don't love the animals you kill and consume. You really mean you love what they do for you: taste good. It is actually self-love. Often when we love a romantic partner it is similar. We usually love that person for how they make us feel. We may protest: “But I give her/him so much!” The rabbi says in real love you don't give to those you love; you love those you give to. True love is about giving, not receiving.

Lewis said God's love is gift-love. We really can't give God anything; everything ultimately comes from him. We are not even that good about reciprocating the feeling of love he has for us. We even have to be reminded to be thankful for all he has done for us. Being God is literally a thankless task much of the time. And yet he continues to love us.

That is how we are called to love others. As Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, if you only love those who love you, what is the merit in that? You aren't doing anything more than anyone else already does. God on the other hand lets the sun rise and the rain fall on the fields of the good and the bad alike. By doing things like loving our enemies, we are imitating God and acting as his children should. (Matthew 5:44-47)

To love like that means that love cannot be based on our feelings. It has to be a commitment, a willed position one takes, regardless of how we feel about that person or how he or she treats us. In a way it is how a nurse or a doctor is committed to treat all sick and injured people who come to them. Some of them are rather unlovely. I have cared for people who were adulterers and those whose medical problems arose from their abuse of alcohol or drugs. Once I was assigned a man who was a local mob boss. I have been a nurse for a man who was shot and lost the use of his legs when his drug deal went wrong and a man who tried to kill himself when his wife found out he was having an affair with their foster daughter. Our code of ethics forbids us nurses to refuse to use our healing arts on anyone because we find them personally unlikable or morally repugnant. We are healers for all people.

In the same way, we Christians are to love all people, as God loves all people. And just as I don't have to like the people I take care of as a nurse, we are not commanded to like or have fuzzy warm feelings for everyone, just to love them, to commit ourselves to do what is best for everyone we encounter. If you understand love as merely an emotion, this is almost impossible to do. I say “almost” because within our families there are people whom we love but don't necessarily like. There's the uncle who is fine to talk about sports with but who always brings up divisive politics during the Thanksgiving meal. Or the aunt who is always there to help you when things go wrong in your life but who lets you know that it is your fault these things go wrong. Or the father who is tough on you, whom you respect but don't like as a person. Or the child who is always opposed to whatever you say and ungrateful for all you do for them. It is possible to love even deeply unlikable persons.

God loves us, despite what we do to his creation and to each other and even to ourselves. He is committed to change that, to make this world and us better. But because this is love, he will not force us. Instead he woos us. He appeals to our minds and hearts that we turn to him and follow him.

Our response falls into one of three kinds. We can be indifferent to his love. Billions are. They don't respond to God's offer of love. They go about living their lives without any reference to God or Jesus or the gospel.

We can lash out against him. This is something I've seen in nursing. You are trying to help a person and they fight you. Generally, I have seen this in dementia and mental illness but every so offer you encounter an otherwise rational patient, who refuses treatment, ignores warnings of what will happen and just wants to get discharged from care. Anti-vaxxers and people who really distrust medical science are like this. And there are people who are not merely indifferent to God but actively hostile to him. They are not so much atheists as anti-theists. They see nothing good whatsoever coming out of any religion and would like to see them all stamped out. Sometimes this arises out of a bad experience they had, often early in life, at the hands of a religious leader, or follower or institution. Sadly, sometimes it is our failure that damages people in such ways.

The third response is to reciprocate,  to meet God's offer of love with love. This can be fish love. Some people love God because of the good it does them, period. The real test is whether we react to God's undeserved, self-sacrificial love by responding in kind to others. Do we reflect God's love in all we think, say and do? Do we, as Francis of Assisi did, embrace the leper? Do we, as Mother Teresa did, care for the sick and dying? Do we, as Dorothy Day did, aid the poor and homeless? Do we reach out to help those who are indifferent, and even those who actively oppose God or ourselves? Jesus took up his cross for us. Do we take up our cross daily for others, bearing one another's burdens? (Galatians 6:2) It is impossible for us to do this naturally. They're not like family. We need God's help. Which is why this is a theological virtue. But what do we really think we are accomplishing by loving the unloving? Next week we will speak of hope.