Notions of Love

For Christians, Love transcends emotions

WRITTEN BY DREW MATZ

Few words are more definitive of the longing of the human heart. Each generation seems to have a slogan which incorporates the word “love.” Love is love, Love is all you need, free love - all of these are an attempt to define the word for a society at large. Today, we can scarcely engage with our culture without encountering these different expressions of love. It seems for much of the world, love is an expression for the opposite of anything that religion proclaims. Yet for believers, love is not so much an emotion to be expressed so much as an action of God that is expressed in the life of Jesus - the uniquely divine person that is revealed to us in the Gospels.

Hollow Love

A contemporary pop-definition of love is a definition that is rooted primarily in emotion. Love in this sense is more of an expression of our psychological satisfaction with our life. That which makes me and those around me happy in any given situation is deemed loving. That which makes me uncomfortable is deemed unloving. We can trace this logic in and through society at large, where our forms of leisure and entertainment describe love as something you can fall in and out of. Even in our marriages, we may hear such things as “I love you, but I’m not in love with you.” This becomes a shift from a view of love that is grounded in the historic Christian essence of self-sacrifice to an idea of love that has become solely an expression of emotion animated by the human will.

Biblical Love

The Biblical witness on the nature of love stands as a direct challenge - both to us as individual Christians as well as the broader culture. Permeating corporate sloganeering campaigns which boldly proclaim “love is love” is an enfeebled inversion of the historic Christian conception of love as kenosis – a sacrificial pouring-out of oneself for the sake of others. Where contemporary love demands self-affirmation at all costs, Christian love demands a radical self-negation. Consider the words of Jesus:

Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”

Matthew 16:24

Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.

John 15:13

I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.

John 10:11

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

John 12:24

Implicit in Jesus’ teaching about the nature of love is that it does not seek glory for itself, but is constantly focused on the other. At its very core, the nature of love is grounded in the self-donation that is intrinsic to the Trinitarian love between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The love of Christ is simply an extension of such love, a participation in the Trinitarian life of God himself which embodies all things. It is not a love that accepts things as they are, but a rugged love that can, as Paul tells us, endure all things (1 Corinthians 13:7). It is not a love that accepts the world as it is, but calls forth life out of a dead creation.

Inhabiting the Love of God

Indeed, the Gospel is an invitation to new life that must confront death. Our Lord tells us that Hell’s gates will not prevail against his Church. However, we tend to overlook the fact that gates are stationary objects. The love of the Gospel is not a defensive posture, but an active storming of sin, death, and hell itself. Therefore, in times of darkness it is imperative that Christians continue to display the light of Christ, to serve as a beacon to those who are searching in the chaos of the post-modern sea.