Everybody asks it. The Trinidadian-German Eurodance artist, Haddaway, posed the question with an echoed chorus and a techno beat: “What is Love?” His answer seems to center around the idea that love opens us up to pain (based upon all of the “baby don’t hurt me” repetitions).
Mother Teresa claimed, “If you judge people, you have no time to love them.” That is sort of an answer.
Mahatma Ghandi claimed that life itself is the byproduct of love
Romance Novelist, Nicholas Sparks, states that “love is like the wind,” imperceivable to the eye, but observable by the other senses.
Lucille Ball implored her fans to love themselves, and in doing so they would find love.
The Beatles melodiously claimed that all we need is love.
Although some of these answers give us a glimpse behind the curtain of love (I won’t mention which ones seem to fall wildly short), none really satisfy the question. Perhaps we have lost a real, solid, immovable concept of what love truly entails.
Therefore, we need to ask two big questions:
What is real, unconditional love?
Do we really want to be loving? Or do we want to be perceived as loving? (Cue the “baby don’t hurt me”)
What is real, unconditional love?
Local tall man and author of my last performance review, Travis Roberts, defines love as “the willing of another’s good.” He was a little annoyed when I asked him to define good. I think he is on to something, however. Whatever is of the purest motives, words, thoughts, and actions must inevitably take the greatest good into account for the other person. Love is whatever it takes to move the object of our love closer to the truest good thing.
If an obstinate child wants to trot into oncoming traffic, love is whatever takes to get that kid to safety. This might be a gentle touch, a kind reminder, or even an abrupt tug and a loud bellowing in their direction.
For a substance-addicted family member, love is not helping to fund their next fix, it is separating them from the vice to which they are enslaved.
In conversation with a friend that is anxiously trapped in the cycle of believing lies about himself and God, love is telling him the truth not blindly encouraging him while he sits in self-defeating deception.
Here the question gets a bit more theological: what is good? Is good something internal, an inherent beneficence that is at odds with outside pressures? Or is the true essence of goodness outside of ourselves, blocked and separated by something bad (or less good) internal? I will save us some time, but the Biblical conclusion is ubiquitous: marred by the stain of sin and death, we are not good. Goodness, therefore, is a familiar, yet foreign entity.
God is good. God is good because He is God. Good is good because it is from God.
If love is willing another’s good, and God is good, then the conclusion seems pretty obvious. Love is doing whatever it takes to bring another closer to God. Removing barriers, translating the truth of reality, pushing, pulling, prodding, encouraging, and admonishing are all clear pathways if God is at the end.
The life and death of Jesus Christ is undoubtedly the clearest and sweetest example of love. His love transcends and soars above every other picture of love that can be imagined. An impossible chasm between humanity (hopeless) and God (goodness) sits uncrossed. An impenetrable boundary of sin blocks man from his Maker. An unscalable mountain blocks us from the heights of perfection found in our True Love. He hiked the terrain to come to us. Condescending and emptying Himself, experiencing the just punishment that we had earned, God broke Himself so that we would not have to be broken by Him. Down to earth, on to the cross, and then out of the grave, Jesus willed us to Himself. And along the way, He has used words like “repent,” “stop,” “die,” and “obey.”
Jesus willed us, and continues to will us, to the Good, and He uses some difficult methods to do so!
Do we really want to be loving? Or do we want to be perceived as loving? (Cue the “baby don’t hurt me”)
If you cannot already feel the tension, this question is infinitely harder than the last, because it is impossibly personal. Only you can answer this one for yourself!
Thích Nhất Hạnh, a well-known Vietnamese monk, stated “Tolerance and tranquility are two characteristics of true love.” On its face, this seems like a sweet and benign statement, but I think there is something that perniciously hides behind the word tolerance. What used to symbolize a willingness to engage with those who believe, live, and think differently than you has found a dramatic shift. Instead of goodhearted, neighborly acceptance, what now masquerades as tolerance is a blind affirmation. Fuse this picture of tolerance with tranquility and the outcome is a parody of love that leaves our world filled with roaming individualists that keep everyone at arm's length, continually walking on eggshells.
What is worse is that many people who identify themselves with Jesus have co-opted this idea of diet-love (all the flavor without the calories) and force-fed the ideology into Jesus’ own phrases, reverse engineering and redefining His words. Instead of the potent and offensive call to repentance and salvation, the love of the Bible is a fulfillment of desires and a pathway to wholeness. In lieu of loving confrontation and forgiveness of eternal offenses, Jesus has solely come to slap a sash around our shoulder and quietly whisper an atta boy into our ear.
The most detrimental aspect of this falsified love is that it binds the hands and feet of those who truly want to love with the type of love that landed Jesus on the cross. To tell someone they need a Savior is to confront their selfhood, and thus deny their existence. Divorcing someone’s strong actions and desires from their identity is now naturally an assault on their well-being. In an Orwellian twist, truth is a phobia, love is blind and deaf and acceptance is burying our heads in the sand.
Notice how diametrically opposed our two understandings of love are. One is a verb, the other is becoming a puppet on behalf of the object of our love. If I can put it bluntly, one is love and the other is pretending to be love.
One is sacrificing comfort, security, and short-term diplomacy for the long-term well-being of another.
So let me ask these questions again: Do we really want to be loving? Or do we just want to be perceived as loving?