Jesus at 2am

In my preparation for this week’s sermon on Psalm 1, I came across this prayer, which I felt compelled to share.

It is found in an orthodox siddur, which I have found to be a wonderful gift for my life of prayer. (A siddur [Heb. for "order"] is a Jewish prayerbook, with prayers for morning, evening, sabbaths, festivals, and the like.  Reading one, you can see how Christians developed things like the Book of Common Prayer.  There are many editions of siddurs, but they all contain the same basic content and structure, and include prayers that date to biblical times.)

When Jesus (and the whole of the earliest church) prayed in the synagogue, the prayers would have been along the lines of what is recorded here.  I find this particular prayer quite moving (as well as being a constant reminder that we cannot understand the message of Jesus if we do not understand it within the larger context of Judaism).

In particular, I am stirred by the gratitude expressed for scripture.  I am the first to admit that there was a time in my life I did not understand what it meant to “rejoice in in the words of thy Torah.”  I understood not only the first books of the Bible, but much of scripture, as a list of ethical demands – what one must “do” to be worthy of God’s blessing and salvation.  How grateful I am for the teachers in my life who have helped me to see God from a very different angle!

By the sheer goodness of God, the faithfulness of Jesus, and our faith therein, we Christians have been adopted into the covenant promises given to Abraham.  I hope you will feel enriched by this expression of gratitude to God, and feel comfortable to add your “amen.”

This is part of the evening prayer service for the sabbath:

Blessed art thou, Lord our God, King of the universe, who at thy word bringest on the evenings. With wisdom thou openest the gates of heaven, and with understanding thou changest the times and causest the seasons to alternate. Thou arrangest the stars in their courses in the sky according to thy will. Thou createst day and night; thou rollest away light before darkness, and darkness before light; thou causest the day to pass and the night to come, and makest the distinction between day and night – Lord of hosts is thy name.  Eternal God, mayest thou reign over us forever and ever.  Blessed art thou, O Lord, who bringest on evenings.

Thou hast loved the house of Israel, thy people with everlasting love; thou hast taught us Torah and precepts, laws and judgments.  Therefore, Lord our God, when we lie down and when we rise up we will speak of thy laws, and rejoice in the words of thy Torah and in thy precepts for evermore. Indeed, they are our life and the length of our days; we will meditate on them day and night. Mayest thou never take away thy love from us.  Blessed art thou, O Lord, who lovest thy people Israel.

— from A Siddur for Sabbaths and Festivals, ed., Philip Birnbaum, 1978.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’  But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…

– Matt. 5:43f (NRSV)

…and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.  “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”  He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’   This is the greatest and first commandment.  And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’   On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

– Matt. 22:35-40  (NRSV)

To embrace the idea that love stands at the center of the Christian life is to dive headfirst into paradox.  For love – of God, self, neighbor and enemy – is commanded as the principle duty of a disciple.  And yet if love is as we have described it – not merely a moral choice (to act “as if” we loved, regardless of our feelings), but a condition of the heart (agape in all its complexity, complete with affection, passion, devotion…) – then it transcends the powers of human volition.  We cannot, by willful effort, no matter how sincere or devout, force ourselves to love what we do not.

How many of us have tried – with the best of intent – to love things like vegetables or exercise or Grey’s Anatomy (long story…), only to find that our efforts amount to naught?  Try as we might, it turns out that our affections are simply beyond our control.  And resolutions to “do better next time” serve only to demoralize us, as our attempts prove continually vain.

If our willpower is so frail as to render us unable to love even these simple displeasures, how much more helpless are we to fulfill the commandment to love the God whom we have not seen or the enemy we have seen all too well? (Thus we can understand the impulse to define “Christian love” as something less than it is – to turn agape into mere behavior not internal disposition.  At least behavior is something we imagine we can control.)

But what is truly required is not a renewed commitment to “try harder,” but a deep surrender to the truth that we must be transformed.  We must be made new, cast in a different mold.  The heart inclined to idolatry, arrogance, self-preservation and revenge must be reshaped, day by day, into the likeness of the heart of Christ.

This is work that only God can do.  And our great comfort is that it is a work promised to us in scripture as an aspect of the Messianic age:  ”…I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you.  A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezek. 36:25f, NRSV).

The wonder of Christian grace is that the very love to which we are commanded is itself a gift!  What God demands, God himself will provide.  And we become the beneficiaries on every front.  We have been set free from a life of endless striving for make a small change here or there, and blessed with the Spirit who will re-create us from the inside out.

This is not to say that willful effort in the process of spiritual growth is not required.  But once we understand how it is that growth occurs, we will find ourselves far more able to apply our efforts properly and with far more fruit for our labor (love, joy peace, patience, kindness…).

It is to the topic of “spiritual discipline” (our contribution to our growth) that we will turn next time…

It occurs to me that, having placed love at the center of the Christian life, I owe you some sense of how I define the term.  A technical discussion, yes.  But one I hope will be helpful.  (If you are truly allergic to technical discussions, feel free to skip to the last paragraph.)

In seeking to understand the biblical vision of love, we are both aided and hindered by the fact that the Bible is not written in English.  It is always difficult to conceptualize ideas conveyed in another language, and thus there is always a sense that whatever we are thinking when we say “love” in English, we are not quite grasping what the original writers were thinking when they penned their words in Hebrew and Greek (and a little bit of Aramaic).  Yet, the mere fact that the scriptures were authored in three languages (and translated back and forth between them) allows us to have several glances at in idea that – in any language – is beyond complete articulation.

As you may know, there are four words in ancient Greek that we properly translate into English as “love” – eros, philia, storge, and agape – and much ink has been spilled in recent decades trying to nail down the distinctions.  The general trend, which I think has proven unhelpful, has been to define each of these terms in contrast to the others, placing each one into a distinct sphere of meaning.

To get a sense of how many discussions go, imagine a blackboard on which we write “eros”  and draw a tidy circle around it.  We then say that eros means  “romantic love” or “erotic love” – love as chemical attraction, passion, desire…  Next to it, we draw another circle, and place within it “philia” and define it as the love of deep friendship, abiding devotion…  Likewise with storge – typically understood as love in the sense that we might “love” a good movie or a Diet Mountain Dew (just sayin’…).  And, of course, these definitions and distinctions are necessary to understanding nuance. But this manner of parsing out meaning can give the impression that the circles don’t overlap, that the language in which the New Testament was written had clear and distinct categories of love.  And therefore, that the NT writers used none of these words, but rather an obscure noun – agape – suggests that “biblical love” is yet another, distinct species of love. Agape, it is often argued, can only be understood as a love that is expressly not eros, philia, or storge.

All this, in turn, has led to what I consider a great over-spiritualizing of “biblical love.”  The love of God, we have been told, is not base like eros – passionate and possessive, seeking pleasure and fulfillment.  It is not rooted in mutual benefit like philia – a bond based on common purpose or temperament or family connection.  No, God is above all such entanglements and complications and self-interest.  God’s love is dispassionate, rooted in willful choice, an act of reason and character, not desire.  God’s love is not contaminated by these more primal aspects of human life.  And we are to seek to love in this same, rarified manner.

The trouble, of course, is that love without passion, desire and the like is not love!  It is uncontaminated, perhaps.  It is not messy.  But it is also useless and impossible.  And, it happens to fly in the face of the biblical story!  Who can read of the pleading of God, the jealousy of God, the anger of God, the tenderness of God…and see God as dispassionate?!?  Who can look at the cross and see only rational devotion to a cause or contract?  If scripture reveals anything, it is that God is very much messy.  God is in the thick of things.  God hurts, God longs, God desires, God has tremendous self-interest (and appeals to ours!).  When God loves, God is all in.

And we should note that agape did not occur to the NT authors out of nowhere.  It existed in classical Greek as a somewhat generic term for love, not separate from the other categories,but overlapping them all in one way or another (in particular, agape had the connotation of preference – to love one thing with special devotion or favor).  But even more important to a NT understanding of love is the realization that agape is the word most frequently used in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, and the version that would have been known best to the NT authors) to translate the Hebrew word for love (ahav) – which we have already seen is anything but distant and clinical.  (A simple, but powerful, example is the translation of Gen. 22:2.  When the translators of the OT have to describe the love of Abraham for Isaac, the word they use is agape…)

All this is simply to say that when I say that love is the name of the game, I mean love.  Love in all its passion and complication; love with emotion and longing and suffering and rapture…  The love of God is a love of deep affection, of raw connection and enduring attachment.  The love of God is the real deal.  And I think we must grasp this in order to know how completely we have been embraced.  And also to know the depth of the work to which we are called.  For if we are called to love our enemies – not merely do not-hate them, to make moral choices where they are concerned, to act with regard.., but truly to love as God has loved us – then we can do with nothing less than our own transformation of heart.   And suddenly we see with new clarity the work of spiritual maturity that lies before us.