Just Love: Reprise
Doxy's Note: I originally posted this piece on May 19, 2007. In the wake of my beloved Phillip's death—and the divorce I did not want—I have been thinking a lot about love and the cost of it. While I'm no longer sure what I believe about the claims associated with Jesus, I honestly have not changed my opinion in the nearly two decades since I wrote it. If there is a God, this is the God I believe in. (I have made minor edits. The original is here.)
I say this unequivocally. Love is hard.
You wouldn’t think so,
given the way loving is denigrated by so many conservative Christians. I
am frequently taken to task by conservatives, who accuse me of ignoring
the God of Judgment in favor of the God of Love. Their beef with me
seems to stem from their view that loving is easy, but the sacrifice
required to give God what He wants (and it’s always HE) is
difficult.
What I take from their arguments is this: Any idiot can love. Only a holy person can sacrifice.
Which makes me wonder if they’ve ever loved anyone in their lives.
***************
The
threads of love run throughout the Old Testament, but they can be hard
to find—buried as they are in God’s whining about the faithlessness of
His people and His commands to utterly destroy the enemies of The One
True Faith. Love often seems to take a backseat to the smitings and
bashing of infants’ heads on stones.
But there are tender
moments. God, the Divine Tailor, sewing clothes for Adam and Eve, even
as He prepares to kick them out of Eden for their transgressions. God,
the sheepish, regretting the burst of temper that drove Him to destroy
the world by flood, and promising never to do it again. God, the
merciful giver of life, hearing the desperate pleas of Sarah, Rachel,
and Hannah and sending them the longed-for sons.
And then comes Jesus. Little baby Jesus. Tiny and defenseless. Surely dear, and funny, and beloved, as most children are.
This is no God of Judgment. This is a God who comes to earth as a baby! Babies don’t know from judgment, but they know everything about pure desire—and the soothing power of love.
If
God had wanted to emphasize His role as Holy Judge, why would He have
come as an infant? Why not come as the Lord of Hosts, Holy and Mighty?
Why come as a mewling, needy creature who spends its first couple of
years crapping in a diaper and unable to communicate except by crying?
Because I have to tell you, that doesn’t do much for your image as a
Scary Guy with Thunderbolts...
No…this is a God who dares to be
vulnerable—wrapping the awesome power of the Most Holy in a fragile
human skin. Coming to earth to experience pain, loss, suffering—and
love.
Which do you think was harder for God? To smite the Canaanites, or to come and dwell among us, in all our vulnerability?
And which thing will save us in the end? The fear of smiting, or the call of relationship?
*************************************
Conservatives
in the church think that if you talk about love, you open the door to
license. They seem desperately afraid that people will run wild in the
streets if they are not terrified by the thought of the God of Judgment,
waiting to zap them for their sins.
I think Jesus saw the problem with this view of God. It is hard to love—really
love—someone of whom you are afraid. And I suspect this is one of the
reasons that God came to earth in human form—He was getting a bad rap
as the basher of infants’ heads against the rocks.
Everything in the Bible points us to this truth---God wants to be loved. Not just worshiped in fear and awe, but loved—as the focus of our deepest desires, affections, and longing.
That
is not to say that there is no aspect of judgment in God’s relationship
with us. How could a God of perfection overlook our transgressions? I
believe that God is deeply grieved when we do things to hurt one another
or ourselves. If God is a God of love—and I believe this with all my
heart—it is inconceivable that God would be able to ignore all the
terrible things we do to ourselves and to one another.
I suspect
that God weeps quite frequently. Jesus taught Him how to do it, you see
(remember Lazarus?)—and if you, like I, know the power of tears...the
clear, cathartic power of weeping...how can you doubt that God weeps for
our sins? Do you not weep for your children when they make decisions
that hurt them?
But a God who weeps for our sins is very different than a God who smites us for them.
If
we believe that God came in the human form of Jesus, we must at least
consider the fact that God now understands why we do the awful things we
sometimes do. If Jesus was tempted in all the ways in which we are
tempted, then we must believe that God “gets” why we stray from the path
of righteousness. We must believe that God has empathy and is prepared to employ that empathy for those He has
created.
But that empathy comes with a price for us. “Just love,”
He told us, through his son Jesus. “Love me and love each
other—forget everything else and just love.”
It sounds so easy—and conservatives apparently think “Surely there must be more to it than that?!”
But
God apparently could not have given us a harder commandment. It is easy
to express some treacly sentiment about “love” (especially that horrid
old chestnut about “love the sinner, hate the sin"), but loving itself
is hard work—and it is sometimes (maybe even often) a hard and
thankless job.
Loving is not easy because true love makes us
vulnerable. And if there is anything that is anathema in our culture, it
is being vulnerable. We have a faux culture of vulnerability (see any
daytime talk show for verification), but we despise the people who
display their weaknesses in public. We watch them to feel superior, not
to empathize. There is nothing so pathetic in America as a loser.
And if you love, you will lose. As Irish Dominican priest, Catholic theologian and philosopher Herbert McCabe, OP said: "If you do not love, you will not be alive: if you love effectively, you will be killed."
Jesus was a loser. And he loved so much that he was willing to lay down his life and die for that love.
He was nailed to a fucking cross for love.
So
don’t tell me that loving is easy. Love will turn you inside out and
upside down. It will delight you, move you, inspire you, transport
you—and it will ultimately destroy you.
Love will kill you, if you do it right.
Jesus
showed us how to do it. He didn’t call down the armies of Heaven as he
hung dying on the cross. Didn’t call for any more smiting or bashing.
Didn’t call for the judgment we so richly deserved.
He called for Love. And it was granted.
So,
my dear friends, do not make his sacrifice a vain one. “Just love”—no
matter what the cost. Believe that God’s judgment comes in the form of
tears, rather than thunderbolts. Believe that when Jesus said “Father,
forgive them, for they know not what they do,” that he meant it—and
that God gave His only Son what was requested.
“Just love.” Love
God, love others, love yourself. It’s a difficult job—but someone has
to do it. Who better than those who claim to follow the Jew from
Galilee?