What is Love?
At Church we teach that God is love and then go home and post online about how we love a new comedy on television. We even use the love sarcastically “I love it!” being muttered in response to bad news almost as if cursing. Sometimes love gets used with greater emphasis the more trivial the issue. We “love! love!! love!!!” a new pair of shoes while expressing a rather tepid love for something of much greater importance. Perhaps we feel the need to overplay our excitement for the small things.
Whatever the reasons, love is a word that increasingly has less power in our vernacular because the meaning is so ambiguous. Does it mean affection or excitement? Does it have connotations of gratitude or pleasure? Is it simply a way of acknowledging that something conforms to our opinions? These and many others are possible meanings of love depending on how we use the word in everyday speech.
- But what is love as something distinctly Christian and spiritual?
The New Testament tells us that God is love (1 John 4:8), and that the greatest commandment is to love God and each other (Matt 22:36-40). If this is true then there is a library worth of words to say about what love means.
I have no library of insights to offer here, but one helpful thing does occur to me. I recall once seeing the Greek word agape which is translated as cherish in one of my textbooks. For years this has stuck with me because cherish is work I never hear used in a trivial way. To me the word cherish has deep connotations as holding something dear to your heart. It implies treasuring something and ascribing great value to it. In my mind, something you cherish has lasting value, not just momentary emotional excitement. You want to guard it, to care for it, to set it apart from the ordinary as good and special.
There is much that could be said about love - about love as a function of the will, of how it requires choice, of how it requires the right kind of knowledge and reason and objectivity. But I think that before we can begin those more philosophical meditations we have to just come back to our use of language and pay attention to how we use the word love. I ask myself, do I cherish this thing or do I just enjoy it?
Ultimately our model for love is Christ on the cross. Looking upon His sacrificial death, we see how He loved and cherished us human beings. Though being God by nature He took on human life and voluntarily died so that we could have the life He wanted to give us. This is how Christ cherishes you and me. It is the sign of how He holds us as good and beautiful and sacred in His heart, even though we are broken by sin. This is a great mystery, that love is a magnificent divine force and yet something so humble and earthy. As best we can, whenever we think or speak of love, we ought to hold this sacred mystery in our hearts and minds.
Unworthy Seraphim
