Living by Love
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You don’t have to be Christian to admire this ancient and beautiful religion and wish to learn from its wisdom. And that wisdom has a simple core. Above all else, before all else, shining out through all the accretions of twenty centuries, is the central teaching of Jesus: whatever we do, we should be motivated by love and act in love.
This is not the message we usually get. Sure, it’s said from many pulpits and lived out in many quiet lives, and we should be grateful for those. But in the most public expressions of this very public American religion, we rarely find—right or left, fundamentalist or liberal, Christian-right evangelical or leftist liberation theologian—anyone speaking as if the most important command to their soul, the imperative their God impressed upon them, was to live by love.
The Christian right has narrowed its focus over the years to an almost single-minded obsession with salvation, particularly saving the individual soul. All the usual expressions of love, such as care for our families, drop by the wayside if they stand in the way of a determined march to personal reconciliation with Jesus. Love as the way to unity with God is a possibility that this branch of Christianity has neglected.
Meanwhile, the Christian left has paralleled this development with a focus on saving others. The social gospel and liberation theology movements—Christian trends dear to my own heart—admittedly get so wrapped up in their own messages of service and justice that they sometimes lose sight of what lies at the core of them all. I’m the first to quote Cornel West and say that “Justice is what love looks like in public.” But we can become so focused upon justice that we forget about the love part. Maybe we are embarrassed to talk about loving our neighbor. And it shows.
Yet when asked What is the supreme commandment? Jesus answered without hesitation: “Love your God with all your heart, soul, and might; and love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 22:35-40).
Not fear God, or obey God, but love God.
Not serve your neighbor, or save your neighbor, or even help your neighbor, just love your neighbor.
Well. It’s no wonder that we shy away from that, because it’s a tall order! What does that love even look like? Doesn’t it incorporate saving and serving and helping? Of course it does. But since we are so prone to do all those things out of worse motivations than love (such as the desire to look good, to be righteous, to prove ourselves better than those other people), let’s set them aside for now, and just ask: what might it look like when we are motivated by love?
Our Universalist forebears sought to answer that question. They, like all the people sitting in Calvinist congregations in the early decades of US history, heard week after week that most of us are headed for punishment, doomed to hell and deserving of it. There is indeed a tension in religion that I think this doctrine was trying to address, a tension between love and justice. Will good be rewarded and evil punished? It sure doesn’t look like that gets sorted out in this life.
Instead, as Ecclesiastes says, the rain falls on the good and bad alike, and the sun shines on us all. Maybe a reasonable outrage at this failure of justice led to the invention of hell as a place where things would finally be fair. Punishment would be meted out there, while those more deserving would receive a reward.
However, early Universalists un-invented hell. They put love first. They believed that God loves us and would not condemn us to eternal punishment. They believed that we should do what is right, not out of fear of punishment, but rather out of unconditional love, such as one feels for a newborn baby.
The love of God, the love of each other. That’s Jesus’s teaching. Right there in our Universalist ancestors. We are to live with the same Universalist love that God feels for us—all of us, the killer as well as his victims.
Whoa. That needs a little exploration. Metaphorically speaking, does God greet mass murderer Adam Lanza with the same loving embrace that awaits the children Lanza murdered?
Yes. Love embraces them all without reservation or distinction.
And a voice in you might be crying out, as it does in me, with a resisting “No, no!” That voice, understandable though it might be, as nearly universal as it might be, is not the voice of love.
Jesus, after all, has a lot of authority on this question. He was murdered, too, and he knew he was being murdered. Yet among his last words were prayers for those who jeered at him while he went to his death, that they might be forgiven. Words of love, under almost unimaginable circumstances
The Universalist answer to the cry for justice, the wish for evildoing to be punished, is that hell actually does exist—in this world, in the hearts of those who can’t speak in the tender whispers of love, but only in the angry shout of a gun. We make our own heaven and hell, and we make other people’s, too.
That is a tough nut, and here is possibly an even tougher one: what must we do to live by love? Must we stop being angry or confrontational? Must we swallow our disappointment and our judgment?
Who can show us what Jesus meant?
Why not Jesus himself?
Ah, that’s interesting. Jesus was not always sweet and patient, much less cheerful. He didn’t match up very well with the cliché Christianity of our culture, that Hallmark-card sweetness. The soft-focus Jesus with the long, flowing, light-brown locks and the ever-gentle expression? He’s almost unrecognizable to anyone who spends some time reading the Gospels.
The real Jesus—by which problematic term, I mean the Jesus who emerges from the complex and contradictory stories told by his early biographers—was not all sweetness and light. He was impatient with the poor disciples, who were so slow to understand his simplest teachings and didn’t get the message even when he put it into parables and stories. He punished a poor fig tree just because it didn’t bear fruit out of season for his convenience. He lost his temper and threw tables around—in the Temple, of all places.
This is the kind of person we can relate to. And I think he has a few things to teach us about love.
We could have gotten a different figure. Christmas could have celebrated someone less like the baby who would grow up to be this rather irascible teacher, and more like, say, Santa Claus. Well, Santa only has to be cheery and generous one day of the year. The rest of us have to plug along all 365 days, so we need an exemplar who lives in the real world; who’s messy, like our lives; who can get angry and dismissive and impatient and even rude at times.
It might be easier for us to love St. Francis, with the birds lighting on his shoulders. Or Mary, with her patient forbearance and almost complete lack of personality. It might be easier to see them as the exemplars, as perfect love. But that’s not who’s at the center of this story.
As Zooey says in J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, “If God had wanted someone with St. Francis’s consistently winning personality for the New Testament, he’d’ve picked him, you can be sure. As it was, he picked the best, the smartest, the most loving, the least sentimental, the most unimitative master he could possibly have picked.”
And he goes on to say that if that’s not who we see in Jesus, then we’re using prayers to Jesus as requests to live in an easy world where no one else is difficult or real. But the world is full of prickly people, downright mean people, even violent people, and, oh boy, look at that. That’s who we’re supposed to love.
That’s who we are sometimes, ourselves. Good thing we have this prickly person to show us how. Jesus was no saint. And yet there he was, teaching love, living love, even in the midst of his cruel, slow death.
So let us clear away some of the detritus of judgment and anger and self-righteousness and narrow political agendas that put themselves forward as the core of Christianity. Let us dismiss the gauzy, soft-focus saints. Let us move past the easy Jesus of Christmas, the sweet cooing baby, and look ahead just a few years to when he grows into an occasionally angry young man, and see how, in all his humanness, he showed us that we, too, could put love at the center of our lives—our flawed, irritable, selfish lives.
From the simple, poor rabbi who taught wherever he went, the Jewish prophet who spoke in the long tradition of Jewish prophets speaking in temper and in love to hold their people to the highest standard—the man who never intended to found a new religion—let us remember the simple words: Love one another.
- Grief and Gravity - October 1, 2020
- On the Threshold - January 1, 2020
- Living by Love - February 1, 2015
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