Materials

Living In The Way Of Jesus, #3


Love
1John 4:7-12, 16-21
by R. Todd Bouldin


We have been looking at the call of Jesus to deny self, take up a cross and follow Him. Jesus said that this is the way we will receive life – by denying ourselves and living life for others. If you seek to save your life, you will lose it, Jesus says. I have called this “the way of Jesus.” The way of Jesus is a cross-shaped way. Today we see that love is the other side of the self-denial coin, the other arm of the cross. Self-denial leads to love. But as long as you seek love, you will never find it. That is because you will still be at the center, and you cannot love as long as you are the one desiring to be loved. If you are to love, you first must be loved unconditionally so that you never love another out of need but out of fullness.

Prayer

Samuel Taylor Coleridge writes of an old sailor’s confession of a crime in “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner”. What the sailor had done was actually trivial, but nonetheless the sailor felt great guilt and felt he must disclose it. During a voyage on the south Atlantic in foggy and cold weather, a beautiful albatross suddenly appeared before the ship and raised the spirits of the crew. The bird followed the ship for days. One day, in a thoughtless act, the sailor shot the albatross that had so delighted them. The weather then turned miserable, and the crew hung the dead albatross around the sailor’s neck to remind him of his stupidity, and the sailor came to despise the bird that had made him happy just days before. The ship wrecks, and only the mariner is saved. In his loneliness he begins to watch the moon rising over the water and the creatures of the ocean beneath him, noticing their beauty and happiness. At this moment, “A spring of love gushed from my heart/and I blessed them unaware,” Coleridge writes. Now, he is liberated from the albatross around his neck and he’s free to pray and notice the creatures around him. Diogenes Allen, one of my professors at Princeton writes this:

Something welled up with him to which he could give the name “love” and he suddenly felt grateful for them. Not because they were of any use to him, because they were not, and not necessarily because he liked them: he found them strangely beautiful but possibly not attractive. The experience was something quite different from this-it was gratitude for their existence.

The mariner had pointlessly killed the albatross. He had failed to recognize it as something which existed apart from his own interests. He had seen the bird only through his eyes, with a selfish spirit. The bird existed for his please and fun. The whole world existed as something with himself at its center. His point of view was the only view. But then he suddenly saw himself in the midst of creatures who had a life of their own apart from any use they could be to him, apart from whether they were beautiful or repulsive. To let them just exist as they were brought him to experience perfect love.

It seems to me that Coleridge’s story illustrates the nature of love. Fundamental to the experience of love is the loss of self-concern. Have you ever tried to love someone whose whole being screams out, “Me, me, me. Love me, don’t hurt me, appreciate me, adore me”? A person preoccupied with the self and the needs of the self can’t love. The freedom from "me" in my relationships opens me up to the possibility of connecting with all people. The more you identify with "I" and "me", the more isolated you become, the more you will look for the one you will feel you deserve rather than being the one that others desire. You will look for love rather than express love. The less identified with self you are, the more connection you will feel with all else around you. That connection is called love.

This is why I believe that self-denial precedes love, and no where is that more evident than in cross-shaped living. “If anyone desires to follow me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” To love is to remove ourselves from the determination of who deserves our attention -- to stop considering the usefulness of a creature or person to us and value it simple because it is. Most of us kill the reality of others and the creation by allowing ourselves to be the only one that matters, as being the only one really in existence. But just as with the mariner, our salvation is in coming to recognize the reality of others and our small but valuable place in that reality. We might call this love the recognition of the Otherness of God’s creatures and people so that we love Otherness and not our own selves.

Is this not the love of God that John speaks of in 1 John 4 when he says, “God is love.”? God’s love has been demonstrated to us in Jesus Christ because, as Paul wrote in Romans 5:6, “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly . . . But God proves His love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” In other words, God showed His love for us simple because we are, not because He had need of us. That is why John writes, “God is love.” This is an amazing declaration that begins with Genesis 1 when God looks upon the creation He has made and says. “It is good.” Not because it met His needs but simply because God loves.

That seems to me to be the essential message of the Gospel. At the heart of the universe, there stands a Force, the Life Force, the very Creator of the world, who loves the world and you absolutely and without any benefit to Himself. You are loved quite apart from what you can be for God or what you can do for Him-you are loved because you are and He has chosen to love you. God therefore, values the Otherness of you.

John spells out our response to such love. “We love because He first loved us.” How should we then love? Without regard to ourselves. That seems to be what John is driving at when he writes, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love cases out fear.” Fear is caused by preoccupation with the effect of another person or thing upon one’s self. At its root, fear is selfishness.

What are the fears that haunt and hinder us in our relationship with others? What problems arise because of this fear? It seems to me that fear displays itself in two extremes: withdrawal and possessiveness, or independence and dependency. 

How then does “perfect love” drive away these fears? Because “perfect love” is grounded in a love from God that is generous and abundant without regard to our value to Him. Once you realize that you are loved by such a God, then you are free to love everything, creatures and human beings, with the same type of “indifferent” non-discriminatory love. We are free to enter into relationships apart from how the person will benefit us, or how they will treat us, or how they will respond to us. There is no “me” that fears being hurt or overlooked or shamed. You will refuse to be possessive and overly dependent because we are not in the relationship for us. It is the decision to let go of the need to make the world revolve around you, your ideas, and your needs.

When I was at Princeton in seminary, I experienced a semester where I felt and overwhelming sense of loneliness. I had no romantic relationship, my two best friends had just begun dating a woman, friends failed to visit my room, and it seemed my contact with members at church had dissipated. I felt abandoned and became miserably depressed. I will never forget one night as I sat in my room alone reading the following passage from a book by Henri Nouwen called Road to Daybreak about his disappointment when a dear friend canceled his plans to visit him at the last minute:

I feel so easily rejected. When a friend does not come, a letter is not written, or an invitation not extended. I begin to feel unwanted and disliked. I gravitate toward dark feelings of low self-esteem and become depressed. Once depressed, I tend to interpret even innocent gestures as proofs of my self-chosen darkness, from which it is harder and harder to return. Looking carefully at this vicious cycle of self-rejection and speaking about it directly with Jonas is a good way to start moving in the opposite direction.

Two things happened when Jonas and I spoke. First, he forced me to move out of the center! He too has a life, he too has his struggles, he too has unfulfilled needs and imperfections. As I tried to understand his life, I felt a deep compassion and a desire to comfort and console him. I no longer felt so strongly the need to judge him for not paying enough attention to me. It is so easy to convince yourself that you are the one who needs all the attention. But once you can see the other concretely in his or her life situation, you can step back a bit from yourself and understand that, in a true friendship, two people make a dance.

Second, I learned afresh that friendship requires a constant willingness to forgive each other for not being Christ and a willingness to ask Christ himself to be the true center. When Christ does not mediate a relationship, that relationship easily becomes demanding, manipulating, oppressive, an arena for many forms of rejection. An unmediated friendship cannot last long; you simply expect too much of the other and cannot offer the other the space he or she needs to grow. Friendship requires closeness, affection, support, and mutual encouragement, but also distance, space to grow, freedom to be different, and solitude.

Once we experience the unconditional love of God, our spirits are free to love others and the creation in the same way, quite apart from their beauty, their repulsiveness, their moral lifestyle, or their value to us. This is agape love or unconditional love, love that only comes from God.

The Gospel teaches us that we have absolute value based on the image of God in us and upon the love of God for us. We have value because we have been created by God to receive Him and to reflect His Image, value demonstrated in the love of Jesus Christ for us. It is only by experiencing that we are loved that we can love.

Once you know the love of God for you, you can be assured in yourself so that you can then give up yourself until you love all and always. God’s love is a love that will never go away – and that’s what we were searching for all along.



November 13, 2005

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