What Is This Thing Called Love?

Some enchanted evening you will meet a stranger across a crowded room. Neither of you has a clue what the other is like. But your heart rate goes up and your imagination goes into overdrive and, well, you know how it goes, right? Happily ever after is just around the corner. Is this love?

On her thirteenth birthday Jenny’s mother takes her to the gynecologist to get fitted for a diaphragm. “You’re a woman now,” she says, “I want you know that you can tell me anything.” Is this love?

“I’m sorry, honey,” says Ken as he picks Nancy up off the floor and gets some ice to bring down the swelling along her jaw where he hit her. “But you know what it does to me when I see you having fun with someone else. I just lose it. You matter so much to me.” Is this love?

Andy says to Lisa, “We’ve been going out for weeks now; everybody does it. If you really loved me, you’d have sex with me.” Is this love?

“My son will never leave me,” says Betty smugly, “no one else will ever take care of him like I do. He knows what’s good for him.” Is this love?

What is love?

“If we do not have love, we are nothing,” says the Apostle Paul.

But what is it, that we should know when we have it? Being human, and infinitely capable of self-deception, we are capable of giving the name of love to things that are pale imitations at best and grotesque mockeries at worst. Is love a feeling? Is love a right? Is love an instinct? What is love?

“God is love,” says the Apostle John. My sister, who isn’t a Christian, thinks that God is an idea of love, an ideal state of being, an abstract state of positive energy, as it were. But that cannot be. Because love is personal, it cannot exist in the abstract. Love cannot be separated from people.

That’s the first thing to remember. Love is personal.

What is love?

“This is love, that he laid down his life for us,” says the Apostle John. That’s the second thing to remember. Love is action. Love involves doing something. Doing what? Giving. Giving what? Giving self. Giving why? For us. Because we needed help. Love involves the giving of self for the sake of another.

What is love?

Love stands in contrast to hate, which twists, makes ugly, and kills. Love cleans, and heals, and brings life. Love is creative. When we love one another, says John, “we pass from death to life.”

Love is personal. Love gives itself away. Love brings life.

The great 20th century theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said that “Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.”

It is when we love that we are closest to God and most like God. But not everything that we call love is what Jesus is talking about, when he says to love our neighbor as our self.

C. S. Lewis in his book The Four Loves distinguishes between what he calls Need-love and Gift-love. “The typical example of Gift-love would be that love which moves a man to work and plan and save for the future well-being of his family which he may die without sharing or seeing; the second, Need-love, is that which sends a lonely and frightened child to its mother’s arms. Of course, Divine love is gift-love. The Father gives all He is and has to the Son; the Son gives Himself back to the Father and Gives himself to the world, and thus gives the world (in Himself) back to the Father again.

"And what could be anything less like God’s love than Need-love? God lacks nothing; but our need-love is the accurate reflection of our poverty. As soon as we are fully conscious, we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually. We need them if we are to know anything. Even ourselves.”

And that is, of course, why love of God is inescapable intertwined with love of neighbor.

Most of us, I think, have grasped that love of God must necessarily be followed by love of neighbor. It is, for one thing, the subject of John’s first letter. “Whoever does not love does not know God.” [v. 4:8] “Those who do not love their brothers and sisters are not from God.” [v. 3:14] “Whoever hates another believer is in the darkness, walks in the darkness, and does not know the way to go on, because the darkness has brought on blindness.” [v. 2:11]

This is made clear in Scripture, because the religious leaders who opposed Jesus claimed to love God while ignoring the poor and needy among them, and Jesus made a point of rubbing this in whenever he had the opportunity. But nowadays it is often the other way around. Not too long before Jesus came on the scene, the Rabbi Hillel told an inquirer that the whole law was summed up in the saying, “Whatever is hateful to you, do not do to another.” In a slightly different form, this has come down to us as the Golden Rule. And many people think that this is the be-all and end-all of Christ’s teachings. But it is only a half. You see, you cannot truly love your neighbor if you do not love God, any more than you can truly love God if you do not love your neighbor.