Reconciliation and Love's Definition

By Peter L. DeGroote

Jesus’ Prime Directive of loving God and others points us toward reconciliation. Standing in our way is the hopeless jumble of definitions for love that include emotional infatuation, pious devotion to prayer, and much in between.

At the heart of the problem is our theological fracturing of love’s meaning by use of three of Greek philosophy’s several categories:  

• Agape: The self-sacrificing love of God or Jesus.
• Philios: Arising out of freindship of men, particularly through shared military and work experinece.
• Eros: Having to to with the sensual and sexual.

These categories often lead to wacky conclusions. Three of the more obvious examples:

• We can think love is central to romance and sex even when those relationships can be filled with aggression, manipulation, and a sense of conquest.
• We can think that our works of charity define us as loving people while we ignore the structure of human relationships that cause poverty, homelessness, and hunger.
• We can sing If We Only Had Love while meaning "if only everyone thought the way I am thinking."

As for the Bible:

• Hebrew Scripture defines God’s steadfast love largely in terms of God’s activity; human love has to do with either following the rules of God or in acts social justice and personal mercy.  
• The Apostle Paul provided some characteristics of the loving personality, such as patience and kindness and the lack of arrogance, boasting, and resentments. While pointing to underlying principles, they do not define love. Also, in one of his more mystical moments Paul observed that while everything else passes away, love never ends. Eternal dimensions are difficult to define and measure (See 1 Corinthians 3).
• Jesus’ conceived of love within a matrix of human motives and values that frame all relationships, a matrix that inextricably tied our relationship with God to our relationships with each other. (John Wesley said it this way: Don’t tell me you love God if I can’t see it in the way you treat others.)

Instead of an objective definition, Jesus told us to take action that would result in our discovery of what he was talking about. Not only did he build the front porch to a household of reconciliation, he handed us the keys to the front door, to a reconciling way of life.  

Those keys included forgiveness, turning the other cheek and praying for our enemies, to name only a few.

The prayer for enemies is particularly revealing when coupled with the instruction to love our enemies, a revelation that God does not share our feelings about our enemies. We are pushed along to grasp that loving God means to join God’s expectation and hope for all humanity. Living in harmony (love) with God seems to mean living in harmony with others, with all of God’s creation. This is called reconciliation.

As I explore Jesus’ instructions, the word “love” increasingly falls by the wayside. Its definitions are so broad as to become meaningless. Harmony with God and others, harmony with God and God’s creation becomes useful. Accepting the understanding that God has the same hope for others as God has for me, I increasingly say, honors God by honoring others and respects God by respecting others.

There is much to explore.