Jesus at 2am

“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…

They say every entrepreneur should have an “elevator pitch” – a cogent distillation of all the research and planning that has gone into the new business that can be given in less time than an elevator ride.  And I fear that if someone were to ask me, during daylight hours, for a similar distillation of Christianity, I would fail miserably.  I’m terrible at short answers, and it’s likely that – without realizing it – I’d be reviewing the history of the Ancient Near East, paraphrasing Plato, quoting Augustine, and suggesting books by N.T. Wright (I would, of course, stop the elevator so I had time to explain the nuances!).

But, as I am writing this at 1:12 AM, I can answer in a word:  love.  For, when all is said and done, I have found no other explanation for the world as I know it – in all its beauty, complexity, pain, and hope – than the vision of love that I believe stands at the center of the biblical story.

And I realize, even as I write this, that it sounds tremendously naïve.  Read just the table of contents of any history textbook, and there appears evidence galore that love is hardly the name of the game.  And this is true even if it is a book on religious history…

Humans are capable of doing extraordinary harm to each other and to the world.  And on plenty of occasions, the perpetrators have claimed to act in the name of love and on behalf of God.

And even when there is no one to blame – when the floods rise, or the crops fail, or the diagnosis is given – it strikes us a convincing testimony that whatever is driving the course of history, it is certainly not love.

I further know, all too well, that there are many within the community of the church who would not agree that love is the center of the biblical story.  In my own, Calvinist tradition, the “glory” of God is often regarded as the driving force behind divine action and human responsibility (though love does, fortunately, get a pretty good mention).

Others see God as primarily concerned with sin and righteousness, goodness and badness.  The Bible is a legal work and a morality tale:  “Here is the law and the story of what happens to those who keep it and those who don’t…”

Some see the gospel in pietistic terms – a guide to prayer and religious observance that evokes divine favor.  Pray well enough or study long enough or discipline strictly enough and perhaps one can escape the bonds of the flesh and live the life of pure spirit…

Quite popular today is Bible-as-Guide-to-Easier-Living.  God is thought to have written the definitive guide to losing weight, getting a promotion, retiring early and raising Ivy-League-bound children.  The list goes on…

And I think that, at one time or another, I have dabbled in most of these options.  But I have come to the personal conviction – which has held steady for a good many years – that the Bible is actually a love story – that the God it reveals and the world it regards as his, has love at the center.  Indeed my recovering-engineer-self can find no other way the math works.

It seems to me that the Bible tells the story of a loving God who created the world and all that is in it because that is the nature of genuine love – it is generative. Wherever love is found in abundance, it will give forth life.  Love is not content with its present boundaries, but seeks to give itself away. And so, once upon a time, the sovereign God said, “Let there be…, and there was…and behold it was very good.”

And what love seeks is…love.  And therefore, creation must be free.  For love is not love if it is compelled or coerced.  Therefore, the generative God, in love, gave creation – and humanity as its pinnacle – the dignity of self-determination.  We can love – God and other.  Or we can not.  And when the answer is “not,” what we call it is “evil.”  And thus all the world can be understood as the tension between love and its absence.

And from creation, the story goes on –  a loving God, confronted with the object of his love which has gone terribly awry.  And what the story tells is the work of a  God who does not reject a world that is pulling on the very threads out of which it was woven, but rather takes it upon himself to sew creation back together.  And thus, there are indeed floods and famines and war and pain…; but love is still at work, mending, weaving, knitting…  I go so far as to believe that Easter was, in fact, the definitive stitch.  On that day, the outcome was determined once for all – the cloth will one day be made entirely whole again.

All this is the only way I can explain the world as I know it.  I see the paintings of a Van Gogh, the statues of Michelangelo, hear the symphonies of Beethoven, read the poems of Langston Hughes, walk the beaches of the Caribbean, see my friends at the café, watch Michael Jordan play basketball…and what I think to myself is:  “Behold, it is very good…”

I have also been chaplain to the oncology service at Children’s Hospital, built houses for the poor in Guatemala, lived with destitute families in the inner city, played games with orphans in Africa… And I have had my bouts with despair at it all, I assure you.  But in every case, what I have seen is that love has been far from absent.  The bad, in my experience, is never as bad as the circumstances say it should be.  And hope is far closer than I can explain.  And, after all these years and all these experiences, the only answer that I’ve got is that someone has their thumb on the scale.  Someone is tipping things to the good.  Love is casting stitches…

I can, of course, prove none of this.  It is but one man’s opinion…  But it is a conviction firmly held. And it will drive everything I write from here on.

All the discussions of biblical study, all the reflections on theology, all the contemplation of ethics, all the suggestions at spiritual discipline derive from this one belief – that love is the name of the game….