The most major of which is that I still feel as though it's a little strange that on Valentine's day, the pressure is not just to feel love towards your partner, but if you don't have a partner to spend Valentine's day with, that you should find one, in order that you may feel love towards them. Now let's pause to consider the absolute strangeness of that issue. You're expected to feel love whether you are partnered or not.
Now, the real world doesn't work that way. Hopefully you have understood and worked out by now that love doesn't exist on its own, but is instead an abstract concept that becomes real only when it is applied to something concrete. It was explained best in a professor Egghead riddle: How is a reptile like a number?
Neither one exists.
Oh sure, you can have a pet turtle, or find a garter snake, but take away the turtle or snake, and what happens to the reptile? It ceases to exist, because it is just a concept. Just like a number. If you don't have six boxes, or six people, or six sacks of sugar, then what happens to the six? Outside of real things, the six doesn't exist, not really. It's just a concept.
Now, that's a massively big brained take for a children's riddle book, but here we are . The usefulness of this concept is profound in Christian thought - love, as expressed in Valentine's sentiments, doesn't exist unless it is attached to something real and concrete. This is something that probably genuinely surprises people about the Christian worldview - that it would be related almost completely to real human beings. Jesus doesn't tell you to love, he tells you to love specific people. And that's much harder.
It's quite straightforward to be a loving person - people do it all the time. In fact, I'll go one better, and say that the vast majority of people who have ever lived view themselves as loving people - generous, kind, good to those who are good to them, that kind of thing. Very few people like to think of themselves as absolute grinches. People believe, however mistakenly, that they are genuinely good and nice people, that they do their best, that they love those who are around them deeply and passionately. Even when all evidence mounts up to the contrary. People believe that they are truly and wonderfully loving, and they can do that because they are people who love, I suppose. They are people who like the concept of love, who believe that the concept of love is a good one, even though they do not actually apply it to the people that they know they should apply it to. And that's the big difference, the big break.
The Christian faith, just like a reptile or a number, doesn't allow you to have or to hold on to the concept of love as an abstract concept. It requires you to have love as a real thing - not in word or tongue, but in deed and truth. That is so much harder to do, because it requires you to take the concept of love, in the abstract, and to apply it to real human beings, who have warts, troubles, prickles and problems. People who have hangups, who are stubborn and recalcitrant donkeys. People who are pushy, who want their own way, who kick back against you and your charity, and refuse to allow you to be or to do what you please. Those are real people, and they are hard to love.
Just like you are hard to love.
This gets brought to a head at the mount of transfiguration, where Jesus is there putting love into practice. What do I mean? I mean that he is there with Moses and Elijah. Elijah makes sense, whisked off to heaven bodily as he was, taken up bodily to the skies, separated from Elisha by horses and chariots of fire, he returns to speak with Christ on the mount of Transfiguration. But Moses? Moses died because of his sins. Moses was buried in the wilderness, having never entered into the promised land because of his sins. Though he led the people of Israel faithfully through the 40 years of wandering, he did not trust in God, and was therefore buried in anonymity. But there he is on the mount of Transfiguration, standing there with Jesus and with Elijah. Standing there firmly in the promised land, talking face to face with God, something that he never accomplished in life, rightly barred for his sins, yet there present with the Lord face to face.
What does that tell you? On his own, Moses was not good enough to enter the promised land. He had sinned, he was rightly barred. But thanks to Christ, who loved him, he stood there in the presence of the almighty, transfigured God. Jesus is preparing to descend that mount, to take up his cross and to die. And he is prepared to live out that greatest love 'greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.' Including Moses, sinner barred from the promised land, yet standing in it due to the grace of Christ. What that tells us is that Christ doesn't love us because we are good.
We are good because he loves us.
He lays down his life, the righteous for the unrighteous, the godly for the ungodly. This is the essence and core of the faith, that love must be applied to real creatures, Christ to us, and in deed, not in thought alone. And that makes a day that is about love mean something. You can love the unlovable, as Christ elected to love you. If you're going to wait for people to be good before you can love them, well, you'll be waiting for a long time. But pause, and remember that Christ didn't wait for you to be good before loving you. And then, once you recall that, then you can remember that we love not because others are so great and grand, but rather, we love because he first loved us.
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