Love (5th of Easter, 2010-05-02)

 Love 5th Sunday of Easter 2 May 2010 [John 13:31-35]

Love one another. That was Jesus’ last command to the disciples. Love one another as I have loved you, he said.

     I wish we would. I wish we could.
     What’s love anyway? Everybody knows that the word “love” refers to many things. What comes to mind when you hear the word? What does “I love you” mean to you? The Summary of the Law says you should love God and love your neighbour as yourself. What do you think that means? How do you imagine doing that? How do you imagine feeling about yourself? How do you imagine feeling about your neighbour?
     These are not easy questions to answer, but we have to start somewhere. So here are some random thoughts about love, which I may be able to tie up in a nice neat bundle at the end. Or not, as the case may be.
     James Thurber said that love is what you’ve been through with somebody. Someone who loves chocolate may have that in mind when they decide to have another piece. Or not, as the case may be.
     One thing is for sure. Love, however you define it, is risky. Tina Turner has a song What’s Love Got to Do with it? It’s a lover’s lament, a very common kind of love song, especially in country music. Lovin’ hurts. The love Tina sings about is painful:

What's love got to do, got to do with it?
What's love, but a sweet old-fashioned notion?
What's love got to do, got to do with it?
Who needs a heart, when a heart can be broken?

     Leonard Cohen has a song about the pain of love, too:

There ain't no cure for love, there ain't no cure for love,
All the rocket ships are climbing through the sky,
The holy books are open wide, the doctors working day and night,
But they'll never ever find that cure for love.
There ain't no drink, no drug, ah, tell them, angels,
There's nothing pure enough to be a cure for love.

     If pain is a sign and symptom of love, then love is a disease. Or not, as the case may be.
 

     I've been reading Gwynne Dyer's book about war. He wrote it in 1982, basing it on a television series on war that he made for the CBC and PBS. It's a gloomy and depressing subject, but anyone who wants to understand how the world works has to take account of war. Dyer’s thesis is that civilisation and war were both born of the agricultural revolution in neolithic times, around 10 to 15,000 years ago. That change in food production led to an increasing human population, and eventually to the invention of cities. Cities have to be defended, so humans invented war. War and wealth accelerated developments of technology and science, and now war has become a suicidal institution.

      One thing is for sure: war is not an expression of love between nations. Maybe if nations could love each other the way people love each other, war might come to and end. Or not, as the case may be.

 

     Love can cause strife. Jealousy is a twisted, possessive form of love in which the lover cannot accept that his beloved may have a focus other than himself. He can’t tolerate the thought that someone or something else matters to his beloved

 

      Well, we could go on, but I don’t think we would find an answer to help us understand what Jesus is commanding us to do. The reason is simple: all the notions of love that I’ve touched on so far can’t be commanded. Love as understood in these examples is a condition, it’s a state of mind or emotion, it’s an attitude towards someone else, it’s a need or desire. You can’t command these, because they are not actions. You can command people to do something, but it’s pointless to command them to feel good about it.

     That’s the first insight: that love is an active verb. What Jesus is telling us is to do something, to perform certain kinds of acts, to make things happen.

 

     So what is he telling us to do? The fact is that the desires and feelings mentioned earlier do make us behave in certain ways. When we feel love for someone, we want to do things for them and with them. Do any of these desired actions fit what Jesus wants us to do? Maybe they do. But to answer the question, we have to understand somewhat better what we mean by the word “love.”

     C S Lewis wrote a book called The Four Loves. In it, he discusses what people refer to when they say “I love”. He ignores the casual use of the word in expressions such as “I love chocolate”, because what we really mean is “I like chocolate a lot.” He talks about four kinds of love between and for other people.

 

     The first is affection, that good feeling we have towards people in our social and family circle. It’s affection that makes us happy to see them, and grieve when they are in trouble. It helps us get along with each other, it forms the bonds that make us into communities. Affection enables us to overlook and tolerate the minor flaws and quirks that would otherwise annoy us. It’s basic, and human, and starts and ends with familiarity. It’s that basic good feeling that grows out of living together in a family or community. It strengthens those ties, and that’s what makes it valuable. But we feel affection only towards those whom we know. Affection depends on physical presence; affection for someone you don’t know is impossible.

 

     Many of us think of affection as the basis of friendship, but Lewis says friendship goes further. Lewis was a great befriender. He knew that friendship can be a source of pleasure, joy, and satisfaction. He says that friends have in common a love for something outside themselves. You discover that someone else shares your pleasure in some activity, some aspect of the natural or human world, and that’s where your friendship starts. You like the same books, you meet on the golf course, you are both quilters or hunters, something draws you together. Friendship consists of doing things together, but the focus is outside yourself. That external focus makes friendship selfless in way that affection is not.

 

     A stronger love is eros, or being in love. That’s the love that Tina Turner and Leonard Cohen sing about. Lewis knows perfectly well that this love can be extreme or twisted or too self-centred, that it may be no more than an attraction to or a desire for an imaginary person, an ideal that we’ve formed. When we are first in love, we see the beloved not as she or he is, but as we want them to be. But at its best, eros changes into something stronger and more lasting than this fantasy attraction. It can make us aware of another person as a person. We love him or her because of who and what they are, with all their flaws and weaknesses, even despite their flaws and weaknesses.

     This love is powerful. Merely being in the beloved’s presence may be enough to make a bad day good. Eros may move us to sacrifice ourselves for the happiness of the beloved. Like friendship, eros may be selfless.

 

     The fourth love is charity. Lewis does not mean simply writing a cheque or dropping a toonie in the Sally Ann’s Christmas basket, although these actions may be valuable and necessary. He means love for other people just because they are people.

     And at this point action does become important. Charity is above all doing things for others. That’s why we think of charitable organisations as helping people, and automatically think of volunteers. You donate to the Cancer Society to help them help cancer patients and support research. You help out at Community Days. You volunteer to serve food at a parish supper. And so on. You do these things not because you like the people that will be helped, although you may in fact like them a lot. You do these things even if you do not know the people you are helping. And if you do know them, you may not like them, you may think they aren’t good or respectable enough, they aren’t your kind of people. This makes it difficult to help them. But you help anyhow. It’s what Jesus would do. It’s what Jesus actually did.

     And one of the odd things is that when you perform these acts of loving kindness, you may well develop affection or fondness for the people you help. You may even begin to see them as persons, not just as recipients of your charity. That’s why personal acts of charity are so important.

     And of course, charitable work is rewarding. People feel good about themselves when they see the good they’ve done for other people.

 

     These four kinds of love and loving and all their variations do feel good. Affection, friendship, eros, charity –  these all can and do make us feel very good. Life is better when we love. I think it’s this good feeling that makes it easy to think of love as simply a feeling. It’s also this good feeling which makes us seek love. But that good feeling may shift our focus from the person we love to the good feeling of loving. We may do what we do less for the sake of the other person, and more for the sake of ourselves. That’s when we discover that the good feelings of love don’t last, and we say that love doesn’t last, that our hearts can be broken.

     But what really happened is that we thought those feedings were the whole of it, the point of the game, what love is all about. We failed to see that love is what we do, not what we feel.

 

     So we come to the love of God, which in Greek is called agape  (ah-gap-eh), selfless love. The word agape is used in John 3:16, For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. It’s used in the Gospel we heard today.

     In the Christian context, agape refers to God’s love for us. That love is in itself an action. God’s love is seen in the act of creation. It’s seen in his gift of free will. It’s seen in his self-sacrifice when we misused that free will.

     We can aspire to return that love by loving each other with a selfless love. It’s not easy. It’s hard to feel affection for a person who is unlovable, and so it’s hard to do things for them. But that’s exactly what Jesus wants us to do. It’s not only here, as he takes leave of his disciples, that he says so. He has already said, Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you, turn the other cheek, if someone needs your coat give him your shirt too. Love your neighbour as yourself.

     Those are hard sayings, they go against our natural inclinations and then some. But we can try to do as Jesus has commanded. Start with little things. Practice the virtues of love. Patience is one. When someone for the 3,027th time does one of those little things that irritate you so much, bite your tongue, and say nothing.

     Kindness is another. Hold the door for someone who’s carrying two large bags of groceries. Better yet, carry them for her. Or him, as the case may be.

     Be generous. When the Kidney Foundation canvasser comes to the door, and you haven’t got a five dollar bill, give her a ten. If you have a fight with a family member, don’t insist on being right, but try to understand why they are angry. Plan how you will avoid causing that anger again.

     We could take all day sharing little nuggets of advice like these. But really, what have I said that you didn’t already know? We all know what to do. We learned it in kindergarten. We just need the will and the strength to do it. For that we need help. Jesus will provide that help, we only have to ask. We won’t change into perfect examples of loving kindness overnight, or even by the end of our lives. But we can and will do better.

     Jesus commands us to love each other as he loved us, selflessly, not because it feels good, not because it raises our self esteem, not because it’s rewarding, not because it’s fun, not because we like someone, but because it’s the right thing to do.

Let us pray.

Lord God, loving Father, Brother, and Friend: help us learn our failings, that we may correct them; and by your grace strengthen and guide us in the works of love that you have commanded us to do, that by our actions we may show your love and glorify your name. Amen.