Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
Truly selfless love is a difficult thing for human beings, including Christians, to understand and desire. We live in a world that places a huge premium on personal fulfillment, on the validity of our own wants, especially as they apply to what we perceive as our own good. The kind of love that is considered desirable in our culture is rarely the love that has no other desire besides the absolute good of its object.
We Post-Modern people tend to view love as something that exists primarily to make us feel good as we make someone else feel good. This is why erotic love sometimes seems like the only kind which is depicted on our TV and movie screens today. Eros is often all about the pleasure people can find in each other through the use of each other. It tends to involve a sort of bargain. If you will sexually scratch my back then I will gladly scratch yours. While not all contemporary eroticism is purely about self-gratification much of it is, and even popular concepts of romantic love that go beyond the mere “hook-up” rarely embrace the idea of consistent and long-term sacrifice for the good of the beloved.
It is indeed impossible for fallen individuals, and difficult for redeemed ones, to fully embrace the love C.S. Lewis defined as “Agape”, the kind of love that involves deep personal cost for the ultimate benefit of its object. We crave our own security and sense of well being so much that we may even find ourselves resenting the very idea that the life our professed Lord led on earth is something we need to emulate. We would prefer to have a little bit of Jesus in us, but not so much that we cannot continue to look out for what we consider to be our own best interests.
This is beyond doubt one of the hardest “spiritual nuts” for contemporary Western Christians to crack. We spend a lot of time talking about living like Christ, but little time actually willing ourselves to die to self in order to do it, and that is because perhaps it is something we simply do not want to. What we tragically do not understand is that truly living for others is what we were divinely designed to do. It is only in entering into a “disinterested” love, which truly puts its object’s best interests ahead of our own, that we will ever live and thrive in any true sense. It is in giving that we become our true selves because God is the ultimate true Self and He, in a sense, lives to give. Somehow giving our all, through Christ, for the sake of another in turn gives us a self worth having because that self then becomes progressively identified and unified with the Self-giving God Himself.
Jesus gave His all “for the joy set before Him” a joy that is derived from seeing the redemption of a race His Father originally created in His own image. Part of possessing that image is the potential of becoming involved in the circle of giving and receiving that is manifested in the Trinity. Somehow God the Father, Son and Spirit exist in a perfect give and take of love, the original “Blessed Community.” In constantly giving to each other the Three are One and the result is perfect bliss within the Godhead. Jesus gave up everything to bring us into perfect communion with that God, the Three in One, but in giving up everything He gained something precious, a redeemed race capable of entering in some sublime way into the dance of love and joy embodied in the Trinity of which He is a part.
We persist in seeking the lesser loves with which this world is more comfortable simply because we do not understand how much more desirable it is to be a part of this divine dance. To be in this communion is to experience the blandishments of Eros (or any other partially self-centered love) pale by comparison. Apart from the agape love of God all the other loves are ultimately worthless. We were created to give our all for others so that those others, and in the end we too, might know the ultimate bliss of being like God Himself. In living this out we find ourselves belonging to Him as a mysterious extension of the blessed community He embodies.
Giving ourselves to such a love as this may be difficult, but it is supremely worth the difficulty.