Tag Archives: Love

Why Us?

19 Wednesday Dec 2012

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Jesus turned and saw Andrew and another following, and said to them, “What do you seek?” They said to Him, “Rabbi (which translated means Teacher), where are You staying?” He said to them, “Come, and you will see.” So they came and saw where He was staying; and they stayed with Him that day…later, Andrew went and found his brother Simon and said to him, “We have found the Christ.”
–The Gospel of John, Chapter 1, verses 38-41, paraphrased

Have you ever wondered why God created us? After all, we seem to be a lot of trouble for Him, so much so that He once destroyed “every living thing” that He had made, except Noah and his family and at least representative pairs of all animals and birds.

But, why would God create us? Some point to Isaiah’s words that say God created us for His glory. Surely this is true. The Westminster Shorter Catechism tells us that “the chief end of man” is “to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” Again, surely this is true. Still, somehow all of this seems a little sterile to me. Using a human relationship, I can glorify a human king by being an upright, obedient subject and by showing proper respect to the king. But beyond that I might never have any relationship with the king.

God moved me beyond my early notion of bringing Him glory when I began to understand Jesus when He said that eternal life is to “know the only true God [the Father] and Jesus Christ whom He sent.” Here, the Greek work for “know” means the most intimate relationship we can imagine. So, to combine the Scriptures, somehow my intimate relationship with God glorifies Him.

But, again, why? What is it about God that wants a relationship with me and yearns for me to have a relationship with Him…a relationship He wants so badly that He, in the person of Jesus, died to have it?

I think have found the answer; and of course I’m not the first to come to this. Here is how I am currently thinking about this question of the creation of mankind. Have you ever had an experience that you found so joy-filled that you couldn’t wait to share it? An experience you just couldn’t wait to invite another into hoping they, too, would share your joy? As a kid I was always inviting other kids to play football or baseball in the park; it was so much fun for me and I wanted us all to have fun. As an adult I encourage friends to go to a particular restaurant or to go see a movie…all things that have brought me joy. Even better are the events in which I share the joy with them, such as shared meals or movies. I really enjoy golf. I find great joy in being outside and walking the course. The (very) occasional good shot I hit is also joyful. My pleasure from golf was actually enhanced when my wife began to play and we could share the joy of the game. It seems natural to us to invite others into that which we have found joyful and in that act find our own joy enhanced; so natural is it that I believe it is part of who we are, part of being made “in the image and likeness” of God.

So, now I imagine the Trinity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit; I imagine the perfect love that exists in the relationship, so perfect that the three are distinct and yet one, unified in love. I imagine the joyous love that must always be present within the Trinity, so present that the Apostle John says that God is love. I find it easy to imagine that God, immersed in perfect love and the resulting joy would want to share that experience; not just by showering others with love but by inviting others in to that experience of love. With whom did God choose to share His experience? Us…He created us to share the experience of love with Him, to enter into the same relationship with God that Jesus has with His Father.

With whom did God choose to share His experience? Us…He created us to share the experience of love with Him, to enter into the same relationship with God that Jesus has with His Father.

Can there be any truth more profound? I think not. When Jesus walked the earth He continually invited others along. “Follow Me” was His urging. Some followed; most didn’t. This inviting is, I believe, at the heart of what Jesus means when as His last words to His followers before being crucified He prays for us to be relationally “one” with He and our Father (John 17:22-26).

I have had a few deeply mystical encounters with God in which I have experienced the briefest taste of His love for me. Its power is incapacitating in the moment. The result of each encounter has always been the deepening of my love for Him. And I have the great fortune of experiencing perhaps the best possible human expression of God’s love in my marriage and also with a small, deeply loving community of committed Jesus followers. These experiences have been important events that have moved me along the path of being transformed into the likeness of Jesus. Here is something I’ve discovered along the way: the more I become like Christ, the more I experience the kind of love that exists within the Trinity, and the more I respond to His invitation to join in His love, the more I long for others to experience it…I long to share with you the experience God is sharing with me.

So, I say to you, whoever you are reading this, I have found the Christ…come, and you too will see.

Eros–Self Love

13 Tuesday Nov 2012

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[Jesus,] who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
—Hebrews 12:2

Self-love. Eros love, to use the Greek. I love myself and I want happiness for me. Is that wrong? Some would say so; they would say that it is wrong for me to want anything for myself. Real love, they might continue, is selfless and total unconcerned for self. This line of thinking has already caused me no little consternation in my own life as I think of my motives in a loving relationship. It is a common way to think within Christianity, but is this true?

Apparently, Jesus believe I should love myself. After all, He explicitly endorses self-love:

You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself. Apparently, if I do not love myself then what hope has my neighbor of receiving my love? What hope do I have of obeying Jesus if I don’t love myself?

Bernard of Clairvaux, the 12th century monk, offers a progression of four “degrees” of love that help me think through this (see his work, On Loving God). From lowest to highest, they are:

1) Love self for the sake of self. This is selfish, self-centered love. He refers to this as “carnal” love. This “first degree of love” is where we all start.

2) Love God for the sake of self. This is where I begin being “in love” when another is involved. I remember saying, “I can’t live without you.” It is loving another because of the happiness it brought me. I began my Christianity this way; I loved God for what He could do for me. Whether it was keeping me out of hell or keeping me healthy…I loved God for what I got out of the relationship.

3) Love God for solely because He is God. As I persisted in my relationship with God and begin to know Him, I found myself coming to love Him for whom He is. He is God and I love Him for that alone. And, as a consequence, I found that as He drew me closer to Him I began to see myself in the intense light of His perfect holiness. There was nowhere to hide; in every act I saw my sin. I loathed myself for the stink of my own sinfulness.

4) Love self only for the sake of God. God never loathes me. Jesus died for me; there is no greater expression of one’s love for another than this. A reporter once commented to Mother Teresa how much she loved the poor. She replied, “I don’t love the poor; Jesus loves the poor and I loves Jesus.” She loved the poor for the sake of Jesus. So it is with me: Jesus loves me; therefore, I love myself for the sake of Jesus. This is Bernard’s “fourth degree of love.” Given what I know about myself, what goes on within me, I have no other basis for proper self-love than this. Any other basis of self-love would be delusional and be the selfish love of Bernard’s first degree: self-love for my own sake.

If I love myself for God’s sake, then I say to myself, it is very good that I exist. In fact, philosopher Josef Pieper (Faith, Hope, Love) asserts that self-love is the love “on which all other [types of love] are founded and makes all others possible.” If I cannot apply the test, “it is very good that one exists” to myself, then to whom else can I really apply it? If the deepest form of love is union with another, then whom else am I more one with than with myself? As Pieper says, “unity is closer to the source than union.” With Jesus and with my wife I am becoming united; only with myself am I in unity.

Self-love is a consequence of my creation, of believing in my deepest self that it is good that I exist, then it must be good to seek my own happiness. I am, it seems, created to be a hedonist…a hedonist according to Bernard of Clairvaux. What does it mean to be a Christian hedonist?

If eros is self-love, then look at the other extreme, agapē love, the love God has for us. It is often described as selfless love, sacrificial love, a love free of self-interest, self-protection, or self-gratification. We say that Jesus died for us out of His agapē love for us…but then what do we make out of the joy He felt as He went to the cross? He was joyful because He loved His Father and out of love for Him and for us was crucified. Doing something for the One He loved and for us, who He also loved, gave Him joy. How, then, can we say that Jesus’ love was selfless and free of self-interest? Was it purely agapē love as we like to define it? Is there such a thing as love that is absolutely selfless?

Let’s try the philosophical technique of reductio ad absurdum, taking this idea of selfless love to its logical conclusion. If selfless love is best, then what about painful love? If it is good that I get nothing out of love, then wouldn’t it be better if it hurt? No.

This selfless characterization of agapē love sounds to me like a very antiseptic love, and I think it is a wrong characterization. I love my wife and my love gives me great pleasure. Should I not want that for myself? I love myself, shouldn’t I want happiness for me? Frankly, I cannot conceive of loving my wife without the accompanying joy and happiness it brings me. I cannot conceive of loving God joylessly. The feeling seems mutual; the old prophet Zechariah tells us that God sings over us (Zephaniah 3:17).

Eros, self-love, and agapē, selfless love. If self-love is that upon which every other love exists, then where does self-less love fit? Does eros end where agapē begins? I don’t think so. Consider the paradox of hedonism: it is the concept that one cannot find happiness by seeking it; rather, one finds happiness by living a virtuous life. However, one does not deny the received happiness as the reward of virtue. Bernard says the same thing about love:

Love is an affection of the soul, not a contract: it cannot rise from a mere agreement, nor is it so to be gained. It is spontaneous in its origin and impulse; and true love is its own satisfaction. It has its reward; but that reward is the object beloved. For whatever you seem to love, if it is on account of something else, what you do really love is that something else, not the apparent object of desire.

Tricky stuff. It seems that if I love serving God or love making Him happy, then those are the objects of my love and not God Himself. My joy, then, would be based on service to Him (likely as I define it) or His happiness (also likely as I define it) rather than God alone. My love for Jesus must be based on my affirmation that it is very good that He exists and my desire (out of self-love) to be united with Him. I am choosing to reorder my life to be in loving relationship with Him. It that because of self-less love or self-love?

I love God and I love my wife. I hope I would find it true were it ever put to the test that I would do anything for them, even giving my life. It is self-less in the sense that I desire nothing more than them. It is selfish in that out of their joy of being loved I receive the very pleasant reward of joy, the desire for which is born out of my self love, my eros.

So, unconditional love between lovers would be each wanting only the other, and out of the joy of the other experiencing joy. In this light, to even talk of “sacrificial love” seems foreign; for the lover there is no sacrifice, there are only acts of love for one’s beloved. For the joy set before Jesus, he endured the humiliation of the cross…my, what love.

The Glory of Jesus Given to Us?

05 Monday Nov 2012

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The glory which You [God the Father] have given Me [Jesus] I have given to them [Jesus followers], that they may be one, just as We are one; I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me. –Jesus; The Biblical Gospel of John, 17:22-23

“It’s very good that you exist.”  Believing this of another is the ultimate in positive affirmation that the other exists, and it is, I have been claiming, the biblical basis of love.  It is what God said about us in the beginning (Genesis 1:31).  It is what we must hear God say to us and more importantly, it is what we must experience from God to be able to love in His way.  It is what we must offer to others if we claim to follow Christ (1John 4:7-21).  However, it is easily misunderstood.

It seems to me that our American culture (all of Western culture?) has taken this “very good that you exist” thing wrongly because of the way our culture has redefined tolerance as affirming anything that makes the other person “happy.”  Consequently, a critical element of love, implied in the statement, has been overlooked.  It is indeed very good that I exist.  I need that affirmation from God and from others in my life.  What it doesn’t mean, however, is that everything I do is good or even that every aspect of who I am is good.  The God of the Bible does not tolerate all behavior and being in the way our society has come to expect.  In other words, who I am and what I do is not indiscriminately excused by God if it is indeed not “good” according to His nature (see my recent blog on forgiveness).  Therefore, as a Jesus follower I cannot indiscriminately affirm aspects of being or behavior that are not “good” according to God’s morality and commands. This applies to me and others–and I’m assuming with great humility that I can know to some extent “good” as defined by God.

I believe that God yearns for our “goodness,” that He wants the best for us; this is clearly seen in the Bible in God’s promises, culminating in Jesus’ death for us and His subsequent resurrection.  Returning to God’s own statement of the very goodness of creation (Genesis 1:31), what is meant there by “good” is “the purpose for which it was created.”  It is very good that all of creation, including you and me, exists for the purpose God intended.  Therefore, it is good that I exist within the context of my becoming fully whom I was created to be.  You, too.  For me, this “becoming” means to journey towards a life ultimately free of the lies in which I have come to believe and the inner wounds I have suffered, a life free of the fears with which I live and the hurt I inflict on others.  I believe Jesus makes this explicitly clear that it is also God’s desire for us in what He says He gives us (see the passage at the top of the page).  He explicitly gives glory to those who follow Him, the very same glory given to Him by God, His Father.

So, what exactly is this glory Jesus gives us?  Theologian M. Robert Mulholland Jr. (Dictionary of Spiritual Theology, Zondervan) notes that an aspect of the Greek word doxa (glory) refers to the “essence of a person, that which makes a person who he or she is” (216).  In John 17:1, Jesus tells us that the Father (God) and the Son (Jesus, God-Man) “glorify” each other.  In other words, both Father and Son find their essence, their true identities only in relationship with each other.  Try this: a human father has no identity apart from his son (or daughter).  It seems obvious that for one to have identity as “father” requires the existence of one’s child.  Similarly, for one to have identity as “son” or “daughter” requires that one has a father.  And so it is with God.  God the Father finds His true identity as Father only in relationship with His Son, Jesus.  Similarly, the Son, Jesus, finds His true identity as Son only in relationship with His Father.  Mutual glorification, therefore, means that only in relationship with each other do Father and Son fully become who they each are (see John 17:1, 5).  And not just any relationship will do, such as acquaintance or friend, it must be a relationship of loving union…they, Father and Son, are one (see John 10:30).

This is the same glory Jesus is offering to us when we choose to follow Him: the glory He has with His Father, God.  Jesus is saying to me that it is only through the same relationship of loving union with God that He has can I find my true identity and become fully who I am meant to be.  (Some writers call this my true self as contrasted with my false self.)  This loving union is the relationship Jesus intends for us in John 17:3 when He defines eternal life as “knowing God and Jesus,” where “knowing” means the most deeply intimate knowing of another person one can imagine.  It is a “knowing” that is most often used when referring to the intimacy between husband and wife that takes a lifetime to achieve (and it is never actually “achieved” since the journey of becoming intimate is eventually interrupted by the death of one spouse–with God, my “knowing” Him, an infinite being, in this deeply intimate way will take an eternity).  Therefore, the glory offered to me by Jesus is to become my true self–the image of God I was created to be– through a relationship of loving union with Him (this relationship is sometimes referred to as the “transformative union” with God).

So, with this understanding of love as affirming the goodness of one’s existence and wanting the best for one, which can only in relationship of loving union with God, then what does it mean for me to love my neighbor as I love myself (Matthew 22:39)?

Self-love is me affirming that it is very good that I exist, where the goodness referred to is that I become freely me–my true self–the me I was created to be, the me whom is free of the baggage of the lies I’ve believed and still believe, the hurts I’ve experienced and caused, the fears that torment me, and the failures that haunt me; it is the me free from all the baggage that hold me captive and feeds my false self.  This is the goodness I intrinsically want for myself, it seems built in to humanity that we each want this for ourselves. I long for this in the depths of my soul…and I can only find it in  a relationship of loving union Christ.

Then, if this is the healthy way I love myself, what about my neighbors?  I surely must want this for them, too.  I must affirm that it is very good that they exist and I must want the best for them, as well, which is for them to become fully the person who God created them to be.  Therefore, I must want them to be in a relationship of loving union with God.  This means I must not want for them anything else, nothing, no matter how pleasant it may seem in the moment, that would interfere with this transformative union with God from starting or from continuing in a healthy way.  And, again, I must exhibit great humility in expressing what I want for and not want for my neighbor.

As for my enemies (Matthew 5:44)…well, the same thing must apply if I am to love them as commanded by God.  I must affirm the goodness of their existence and I must want for them the things that move them toward a relationship of loving union with God.  Only in this way, it seems to me, can I fully and rightly (righteously) hate the things they do to interfere with their relationship with God thereby preventing them from becoming fully themselves as they are created to be by God.

This, I believe, is what it means to hate the sin but love the sinner, whether that sinner is me, my neighbor, or my enemy.

Sadly, not everyone will appreciate this point of view; most, in fact, will not (see Matthew 7:13-14).  Our society spends a lot of money trying to convince us, and we try to convince ourselves and each other, that many, many things and behaviors are good for us when, in fact, they keep us from this type of relationship with God, and, therefore, from becoming who we are in Christ.  Generally, most of us don’t want to become fully who God created us each to be, at least from God’s perspective; rather, we continue to think we know better than God what is best for ourselves.

A relationship of loving union with Jesus, a transformative union: it is what Jesus means when He says He is the only way to God, the Father (John 14:6).  No other relationship will do.  None.

Becoming my true self in relationship with Christ, this is what it truly means to be “saved.”

An Enemy of God…Who, Me?

18 Thursday Oct 2012

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“You have heard that the ancients were told, ‘You shall not commit murder’ and ‘Whoever commits murder shall be liable to the court.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court; and whoever says to his brother, ‘You good-for-nothing,’ shall be guilty before the supreme court; and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell.”
–Jesus; the Gospel of Matthew, 5:21-22

It is very good that you exist. This, according to philosophers and, I believe, the Bible, is the basis of love. I left off wondering whether I could really say that to an enemy, someone like, say, the killer of this 10-year old Colorado girl, or the Taliban who shot the 14-year old Pakistani girl who stood up in her country for the right for women to be educated. Is it really very good that these kinds of people exist?

In His famous speech, called the Sermon on the Mount because it was made on a hillside, Jesus equates anger with murder. Broadly speaking, it seems there are two kinds of anger. First, there is “other-centered” anger born out of wanting the best for another: “You knew the material but you failed the test!” Jesus’ anger was this kind of “other-centered” anger. The other kind of anger is “self-centered” anger. This anger arises in me when you act to thwart my will by not letting me have my way or what I think I deserve: “That idiot cut me off in traffic.” The vast majority of anger is this type, I think.

At first, Jesus’ equating anger with murder seems astonishing, particularly when I realize He is talking about any self-centered anger, even angry thoughts. After all, don’t we say, “sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” Every school child learns this rhyme. We learn to excuse words spoken in anger at an early age. Yet Jesus doesn’t seem to distinguish between types of anger, all is equated with murder. The angry and the murderer are each destined for a “fiery hell.”

Why does Jesus do this, set this impossibly high standard by equating anger and murder? Isn’t it because anger is one of the roots of evil acts in the world? Jesus’ brother James says it this way (James 4:1-4):

“Where do you think all these appalling wars and quarrels come from? Do you think they just happen? Think again. They come about because you want your own way, and fight for it deep inside yourselves.

You lust for what you don’t have and are willing to kill to get it. You want what isn’t yours and will risk violence to get your hands on it. … You’re spoiled children, each wanting your own way. …

If all you want is your own way, flirting with the world every chance you get, you end up enemies of God and his way.”

Self-righteous anger denies that it is very good that the other exists. It says instead, “Get out of my way, your very existence is impeding me!” Murder may be the ultimate expression of this anger–the actual causing another to cease to exist–however, whether murder, other violent acts, abusive words, angry outbursts, or hurtful thoughts, all come from self-centered anger; the root is the same for all. So, according to James, even an angry thought born out of my self-centeredness makes me an enemy of God as much as the murderer!

It is very good that you exist. The murder kills; I act out of only run-of-the-mill anger; we are both guilty in the eyes of a Holy God. So, if I can’t say that it is very good that the killer exists, then how can I say it about myself? And yet, God says it about both of us, the angry and the murderer. How can that be? More thinking to come…

We Are Blessed

17 Wednesday Oct 2012

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God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them…
–The Biblical Creation Account; Genesis 1:27-28

In his book, Faith, Hope, Love, Josef Pieper examines the language we use to describe the various types of love, (e.g., self-love, friendship love, erotic love, selfless love) and finds a common theme regarding the nature of love: acceptance, in the sense of the Latin meaning, “good.” God’s first act toward created man and woman was to “bless” them, to praise their existence and to accept the first humans as “very good” (Genesis 1:31) “It is very good that you exist,” He says to all of mankind. This acceptance is based on nothing other than our very existence as humans, not our looks, our performance, or any other quality beyond our existence as humans.

Setting aside for a moment the fact we each have behaviors that should not be excused, stop and feel this statement: It is very good that you exist as a human being.

It is very good that you exist; for me, this offers the most profound comfort, a near tear-producing sense of acceptance in the core of my being. I feel a freedom I have never known, freedom from trying to earn acceptance and freedom from the fear of losing it. In God’s eyes, it is very good that I exist. God said it a little differently to His Son Jesus: “This is my Beloved in whom I wam well pleased.” This is the love God has for us, too.

Philosophers going back to Plato have tied one’s love to the acceptance of the other’s existence. Further, they have noticed that there are healthy degrees of acceptance. For example, I feel toward a stranger, and toward a friend, and toward my wife that it is very good that they each exist. Yet it is clear to me, and these philosophers agree, that I feel a different degree of passion toward a stranger than I feel toward my wife.

In the case of the stranger my affirmation of his goodness of existence simply acknowledges he is a creation of God. I have a general, caring passion–love–for him in the sense that he is a fellow human being. At the other end of the scale, however, my love toward my earthly beloved (my wife), entails an additional desire or passion to be united with her: a desire that we two become one flesh (Genesis 2:22-25). We remain remain distinct persons, but are united by a common passion to deeply know the other.

My longing for oneness with my wife is not surprising to me. It is a result of my Trinitarian theology. God is three separate persons, distinct in that the Son is the begotten of the Father and the Spirit precedes from Father and Son. And yet they are one in essence, each sharing the attributes of God. They are also one in relationship: theologians call it “mutual interpenetration,” Father, Son, and Spirit each in the other and each with the other in them. There is unity in their diversity.

I’m made in the image of God, Who is love. While God cannot share His essence with me, those things that make Him God, such as His infinite nature (I am forever finite), He has elected to allow me to share in His relationship; I am one with Him in relationship (see Jesus’ words in John 17:25-26). So, it is no surprise to me that in an earthly relationship I should long to be one in relationship with my beloved, my wife.

Great stuff, at least to me.

So, my love for another, in its most basic form, is the affirmation that it is very good that the other exists. But…doesn’t this understanding of love make it that much harder to obey Jesus and love my enemies, and in this particular case, Jessica’s killer? Can I really say to this killer, “It is very good that you exist?”

It Was Very Good

15 Monday Oct 2012

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God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
–The Biblical Creation Account; Genesis 1:31

God talks to me a lot. That may sound funny to many; however, it is true. No, it is not an audible voice; rather, He speaks to me through others, usually authors, and most frequently through authors who are no longer living. Is has ceased to surprise me that as I am puzzling over a question authors will appear with whom I can enter into the question at hand. This quetins of loving one’s enemy is no exception. Enter Josef Pieper, a German Christian (Catholic) philosopher who specializes in the writings of Thomas Aquinas. My thinking is my interacting with his (Faith, Hope, Love, Ignatius Books) writing on love and that of others.

Love is one of the three theological virtues; faith and hope are the other two. The greatest of these is love (1Corinthians 13:13); faith and hope cannot be understood apart from love. But, what does it mean to love? Poets have tried for millennia to describe it. “How do I love thee…” Elizabeth Barrett Browning famously asks, then tries to answer. St. Paul, the poet, tries to describe love in his letter to Corinth (Love is patient, love is kind,…1Corinthians 13:4-8). Poetry, in fact, seems to be the only language we have to express love, and even often it seems inadequate even in the hands of a master poet.

St. John, often called the Apostle of Love, dispenses with poetry and states a brute fact: God is love (1John 4:8). This is what Christians believe and it is at the heart of the Christian conception of love: we must love our neighbors because God first loved us (1John 4:19); failure on our part calls into question our love for God (1John 4:20); mutual abiding, God in us, us in God, perfects love within us (1John 4:16-17).

The Christian account of creation begins with, “In the beginning, God created…” All that is other than the Trinitarian God Himself–Father, Son, Holy Spirit–has been created by God, this is the Christian view. At the end of the creation period (six days or day-ages), God “saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). It was very good. In God’s eyes, it is good that the creation exists. Why is the creation “good”?

To answer that question, it seems to me, is to answer the question, “Why did God create?” I can’t pretend to know the motives of God; however, perhaps we can infer at least some of the answer. The trajectory of the Christian scriptures, the Bible, tell us that God wants a relationship with us, and more than a God-servant relationship, He wants to share the very relationship with us that exists between God the Father and God the Son (Jesus). We are invited to be one with Jesus as Jesus is one with God the Father (John 17:25-26). Perhaps, then, the love that exists between the three persons of the Trinity is so profound that this loving God determined to share it with created beings made in His image (human beings, see Genesis 1:26).

Loving Enemies

15 Monday Oct 2012

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“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?”
–Jesus; The Gospel of Matthew, 5:43-47

In Colorado, a 10-year old girl, Jessica Ridgeway, is kidnapped and, days later, found dead in a field. The community is deeply shaken and scared. The killer is still at large.

We are told by Jesus to love this killer.

How can this be? By societal norms all would agree that the act itself was monstrous; many would call the killer a monster. Yet, Christians are called to respond by loving this person, the killer of a child. It seems to make no sense; surely Jesus is mistaken, He was really talking about your average run-of-the-mill enemy, right? the kind of person that just insults us or perhaps the neighbor who has a dog that barks all night. He didn’t really mean to love this sort of person, did He? Certainly they are beyond our love; only God could possibly love such a being.

Love the sinner, hate the sin, isn’t that our standard Christian response? Hating the sin is easy; loving the sinner is fine in theory, but it seems hard in this particular case to be able to love the person who would perpetrate such a horrific crime and inflict such pain on the young girl’s parents and the community at large. How does one love while simultaneously hoping the killer is caught and punished? And we are commanded to do more than love, we must also pray for this killer. Certainly there can be no harder command of Jesus than His command that we love and pray for this kind of neighbor.

These kinds of questions have led me to wonder about the true nature of love as God intended it, and not as our culture has corrupted it (e.g., reducing love to sex or tolerance). Maybe by understanding how to love and pray for this killer as God would have me I can better understand what He means when He says to love Him with all that I am and to love my neighbor, including the terrorists, my literal neighbors, and my family members as I love myself.

If you are following along, I’m going to try to keep the individual posts of my journey through this shorter; however, they may be more frequent because I want to work through some of what I’ve been reading, and this is my means to do so.

Children of God

10 Monday Sep 2012

Posted by in All, Hope

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But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God—John 1:12

So, I have been asking myself that same question I posed earlier in this series of blogs on the theological virtues…what is the Good News of Christ for me? The elementary things I mentioned earlier, repentance, faith toward God, resurrection from the dead, and eternal judgment have all had their day, their time of primacy, in my thinking about the Good News for me. Because they are foundation, they remain very important. But, they are no longer enough. The question:

Isn’t there something more?

has continued to plague me.

Now I find the Good News–my foundational hope–is in the promise of God that has been increasingly revealed over thousands of years. Seems like a no-brainer, but it hasn’t been for me. The promise started with God’s promise of land and becoming a great nation made to Abram (Genesis 12:1-3). It opened up more as a promise of kingdom with God’s man always on the throne in the promise made to King David (2Samuel 7:8-17). With the later prophets there were glimpses of something more, an early marriage metaphor (e.g., Hosea 1:2) and of God delighting in us (Zephaniah 3:17).

Yet, I was confused. With the person of Jesus came the doctrine of the Trinity formulated by the early church fathers: “God is three persons (Father, Son, Holy Spirit); Each person is fully God; There is only one God.” In the context of the Trinity there were many metaphors: friend of Jesus (John 15:14), slave (bond-servant) of Jesus (Galatians 1:10), bride of Jesus (Revelation 21:2), child of God (John 1:12), united with God (John 14:23; 17:21), sibling of Jesus (Romans 8:29), and our being filled with the Holy Spirit (John 14:16-17). As I moved past the elementary things of what God had done for me, I found I had an identity crisis regarding who I was as a Christian. Each of these metaphors gives a different relational image between me and God…which is it?

Over the past five or six years and with the help of many men and women past and present, each much smarter than I am, the promise of God has been slowly dawning on me. Here is how I see it at this point in my journey with Jesus:

I am being united with Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit; Christ brings me into oneness with our Father (not in the pantheistic sense). Though it doesn’t conflate all of the above metaphors, I think it happens like this:

For more than 40 years I was a son of Satan (John 8:44). It was an abusive relationship, a sick distortion of love as with any abusive relationship; this one masquerades as father-son but is truly master-slave in the worst sense. When I turned to Jesus, all I knew was slavery and abuse disguised as love. While I believe that at that moment I actually became God’s son, I didn’t know it nor did I understand what it meant. So, I acted as I knew how, as a slave of Jesus.

It is much like any human who has been abused. It takes a long time for him or her to begin to trust someone who genuinely loves them. As Jesus’ slave, I was always waiting for and expecting the abuse; my image of God was a God who tallies mistakes and punishes capriciously. As I began to believe God could be trusted, we became friends and we interacted as friends. And, over time, as sometimes happens with human friends, our love as friends began to deepen into something more.

Along with some theologians I believe that the Holy Spirit is the personification of the loving relationship between Jesus and His Father. Their relationship is so real is has personhood. That same personified love is helping me to become one spirit with Jesus (1Corinthians 6:16-17; the two become one, the marriage metaphor). As I learn to cooperate with the Spirit in me to become increasingly purified through my obedience and God’s help and discipline, I draw closer in unity with Christ. (St. John of the Cross used a window metaphor: the purer the glass the more light shines through.) So in Christ, to use St. Paul’s phrase, I am actually God’s child even now. God the Father looks at me with the same loving gaze as He looks at Jesus. With Christ in me, another of Paul’s phrases, and the work of the Holy Spirit, I an actually becoming one with Jesus, taking on His characteristics (the so-called fruits of the Spirit of Galatians 5:22-23, and I gaze upon our Father with the gaze of a truly loving son, the gaze of Jesus.

St. John of the Cross says this (Ascent of Mount Carmel):

Love effects a likeness between the lover and the loved.

Love is the transformative agent for humans into the likeness of God as we were first created to be (Genesis 1:27). It should be no surprise; after all, God is love (1 John 4:8) and knows us only through love (1Corinthians 8:3). Therefore, as I love Jesus more deeply I find I increasingly become like Him; the two of us becoming one through the power of Love personified, the Holy Spirit.

So, this is the promise of God for me, it is the basis of my fundamental hope: that I am united with Jesus in love through the power of the Holy Spirit, and that Jesus will lead me into oneness with our Father. It is the greatest not-yet-being kind of hope, the only real hope for me to become who I really am and was created to be.

Some have hopes of a reward of a big mansion in heaven (John 14:2) or to finally become holy (1Peter 1:16) or to sit on a cloud for all eternity playing a harp (that sounds more like an agonizing existence to me). I look forward to being face-to-face with the One I am coming to love so deeply, becoming one with: Jesus. This is the only reward I want: the time to know God intimately as I truly am, and, through Jesus, to be in a genuine Father-child relationship with our Father as a part of the family of God. This is my foundational hope.

I think this is the foundational hope offered by God to the world. I believe the world is desperate for this hope.