The words “I Love You” are perhaps the most overused and misunderstood words in the English language. We know what we mean by them but, it seems, we don’t always understand what we mean.
In our culture “love” is a feeling, and often a passing transitory feeling. We have the spectacle of President Bush wanting to protect marriage so that Brittany Spears can, legally, get married and divorced in the space of 24 hours; but lesbian and gay people are denied the chance to make life long vows of commitment which are recognised and honoured by the state.
Each month wedding couples come to me to discuss their desire to have a wedding with MCC. I enjoy this part of my ministry – most of the time. It is a privilege to meet couples who are sure about their love for each other, who have weathered storms together and have come to a mature, fuller understanding of the commitment they are making. It is also a part of my ministry I am most uncomfortable about – it is worrying to see couples who are obviously still very new together, or who have had a huge row and who think that somehow having a blessing service will make everything all right. We say that we will not normally meet with couples to discuss weddings for couples who have not been together for at least 6 months, but sometimes I think they lie to me.
When I wonder what is going on here I think they have misunderstood what the word “love” can mean. But, there again, this is not difficult to do considering the confusion in our culture about what love is and the fact that our language has only the one word “love” when other languages, and the Greek of the New Testament has at least four words.
One Word – Four Meanings: Four Meanings – One Word
When we use the word “love” we do use it in different ways. I love my mother but in a different way to the way I love Ian. I love my best friend John in a different way still which is different to the way that I love my job or the people I serve as pastor. But we only have the one word to sum up all these different contexts and meanings.
In Greek, and in the Greek used in the New Testament, four main words are used for the term “love”. Each of these words has different meanings and nuances.
The first word is "eros". We know what this type of love is all about. It’s where we get the word erotic from. It’s the wow stuff. It is exciting, it involves hormones and pheromones and energy. It makes us do some very silly things and it is what most people thing love is. It means romantic and sexual love between lovers. It’s the root of lust – which can be both negative and positive. It’s about wanting to find pleasure in the company of another and in the body of another. Lust is negative when we are wanting only to find pleasure and fulfilment for ourselves and not to give that to others. When we start a romantic relationship it is this stuff which lights the fire in us. Sometimes we call it infatuation as we have all the emotional and chemical stuff going on in us. It’s great, its like being on a roller-coaster and like all good roller coaster rides, its fast, its exciting, it has lots of ups and downs, but it doesn’t last that long! It couldn’t. You can’t live on the roller coaster for too long without getting rather sick. Some people think that when the infatuation wears off, when eros is getting a little weaker love is “dying” – often it is changing but we can’t recognise this. In relationships we have to recognise that love may start off as a feeling, but it isn’t going to remain that. Love is not a feeling, its an act of our will. Once the hormones and pheromones die off we are left with building a relationship, and going deeper than those first, wonderful and troubling emotions. Love will die if we don’t work at it, if we don’t communicate, if we let other things get in the way, but at its heart, love is an act of our will, if we see it simply as a feeling we will find relationship after relationship going wrong and ending.
Apart from this romantic love there is also love between friends. In Greek this word is “philia”. We all know this type of love and know that it is different from the romantic erotic love we just talked about. My generation values friendship highly, I am fiercely loyal to my friends and would do almost anything for them. I become something of a street figher to protect my friends and know that I can become very fierce with those who upset or betray them. I value friendship highly and expect a lot of myself in a friendship, and, sometimes unwisely, of my friends. But this type of love is different from erotic and romantic love. I do not seek to fulfil the romantic or erotic needs of my friends – somehow that feels wrong – even though I know that people who have been friends for years sometimes become lovers – which might mean that the love they had for each other has changed or wasn’t ever recognised for what it was.
Then there is the love we feel for our families. This is different again. We choose who our friends are – often with some, albeit unconscious, care. But we don’t get that much choice about who our families are. We are brought up to love them – indeed the Bible tells us to honour our father and mother. Sometimes, this is easier than others. The strange thing about this type of love, in Greek called “storge” is that it is very difficult to end it. Sadly friendships come to an end, but no matter how estranged one is from one’s family, they still are your family! We may not talk to them for years, we may seethe at them, loathe them, get totally fed up with them, but they still are our family and we recognise that we have some duty to them. Of course, many of us find that this type of love is not at all onerous and enjoy wonderful relationships with our families, and “storge” is good. What is different about it, though, is that it stems from a sense of obligation and duty, whereas “philia” the love we have for our friends is what we choose to give and “eros” often takes us by surprise!
As interesting as all these loves are, they don’t speak of the love that Jesus was talking about in today’s reading from St John’s Gospel where he says “I give you a new commandment, love one another; just as I have loved you, you also must love one another”. This type of love is radically different from all the others. In Greek it's called “agape” and it means a sacrificial, unconditional and possibly unreciprocated love.
Agape
Agape is about giving of ourselves expecting and wanting nothing in return. It means loving other people regardless of whether you like them or whether they love you. It’s supreme example is in Jesus who laid down his life, not only for his friends, but for everyone.
I was driving in Birmingham yesterday and I saw a church with three crosses along the wall of it’s church yard. The middle cross had the word “forgiveness” written on it. The one on the left had “refused” and the one on the right had “accepted” on it. These represented the two thieves who were crucified along with Jesus – one who accepted the forgiveness on offer and one who didn’t. Agape love made Jesus lay down his life for both thieves – and for us – even though one of them didn’t want to accept what was on offer. It is this last form of love that Jesus commands us to have for each other.
Jesus’ Command
Jesus command to us is to love one another. How do we do this? I would like to offer three suggestions.
A: Love is different from liking!
Love is a different thing from liking another person. We like someone else because of ways in which we can make positive connections. We share a similar humour or outlook on life, we complement each other, we find it easy to spend time with them. There maybe something about attraction and romance going on as well, but generally it is easy to spend time with the people we like. It is easy to do things, even things that inconveniences us, for those we like.
Agape love, however, is different. We love others regardless of whether or not we like them. We love others regardless of whether we will “get anything back” because of our actions. This type of love is not about a feeling, it is not about willing ourselves to think nice things about the other, it is about our actions and the motivations behind our actions.
It is about serving each other, going out of the way for each other, putting ourselves out. It’s about listening to each other, supporting each other during both good times and bad - and all this regardless of whether or not we like each other.
Churches are peculiar places for a number of reasons – not least of all because of the people who are in them! When we are in church we are here to love and serve God – and we love and serve God by loving and serving God’s people. This is not a social club. There will be people in the church whom we like – hopefully lots of them – but there will also be people we don’t like, people we find it harder to get along with. God puts these people there to help us learn to love. Of course, we might be the person that someone else finds it very difficult to like! I get puzzled and annoyed when I hear people say “oh, I’m not doing that” or “I’m not coming to that event” because X will be there and I don’t like X. When we say that we are missing the point, we are commanded by Jesus to love X – and that does not mean we have to like X, but we do have to love, serve, care for and pray for X. So my first challenge to us this afternoon is a simple one; how do we show love for those we don’t like?
B: Love is often Tough
Sometimes when we hear the word “love” we think that we mean nice gooey, soft things. Often love is nice and soft and gooey. But often love is tough. As you know Ian and I love our dog Beech. In fact we are both quite potty about him. It would be very easy to feed Beech all the time, in fact Beech does not understand the concept of “enough” when applied to food. If we fed him all he wanted he would be like a very large biscuit barrel with a leg in each corner. He would develop joint and heart problems and have a shorter life. He would become ill and not even enjoy the shorter life that he would have. It is tough to say “no” when a beautiful dog is gazing at you when you are eating something, but it is the most loving thing to do.
Now that is a rather simple example, which doesn’t disturb any of us. Sometimes love has to be tough and it is disturbing. A couple of years ago I was asked by someone who used to come to church if I would tell his boyfriend that he wanted to end the relationship. Now there are many things I do as a pastor, but dumping other people’s partners because they are too scared to, is just not one of them! I had to get very tough with this guy and say that his request was unreasonable, and that he was being a coward. If he had the courage to get involved with this person, then he needed to find the courage to end the relationship. I said I would be supportive to them both as they renegotiated the relationship and offered various resources and advice about where to go to get relationship counselling but I would not do the deed myself! Of course this parishioner was shocked that I could be so firm and “nasty”! With the same person I had to tell some home truths too as well which he didn’t appreciate. But Love is tough. I would not have done him any favours to be gentle and nice and smiling and generally weak.
When we tell people that their behaviour is inappropriate we are acting in a loving way, both to that person and to the wider community we are seeking to protect. I am so proud of this congregation now as when there is inappropriate gossip or backbiting the people who are doing this are challenged and told this is wrong. This leads some people to think that the people standing up for tough love are “bitchy queens” but they are not, they are being mature and demonstrating agape love. Love for the people who are behaving inappropriately and love for the community here who deserve better. Love is tough. So my second challenge to you is do you show tough love or do you back away wanting a quiet life? Which is more loving?
C: Love the World
My final thought about showing agape love in action is to love the world. This sounds strange as many of us come from Christian traditions which are very content to condemn the world and to play as small a part in non-Christian culture as possible. The evangelical church I attended in my teens prided itself on offering almost a total alternative culture. Most nights of the week one could attend church meetings, we had church holidays away together, we listened to Christian music all the time and only read Christian books. It was quite a challenge to know how to evangelise really as we only ever mixed with Christians!
But St John’s Gospel tells us that God so loved the world that He sent his only Son to the world. Loving the world with agape love does not mean being conformed to it. But it does mean we have to embrace the world, to serve the world, to tell it like it is and to change it. Agape love gets us to write Amnesty International letters to oppressive governments in the hope that people we have never met and will never meet and who don’t even share the same faith as us, are treated better. Agape love motivated Mother Theresa to serve the poor and the dying in Calcutta. Agape love motivates us to serve. So my final challenge is how do you serve others, not in the church through your life?
Conclusion
There are many kinds of love that we experience. The fact that we experience so many kinds of love means we often don’t understand what we mean when we say, or someone says to us, “I love you”. We usually think they mean they, or we, are “in love” with the other. We also think that being “in love” is all about feelings and not about our wills. However, the Bible says there are many different types of love and the love we should demonstrate to each other in the Church and to the world is the highest form of love, in Greek called agape. This is love which is sacrificial, which may be unreciprocated and which is difficult. This is what Jesus tells us to do when he tells us to love one another.
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So how do you show love for those you don’t like?
> Can you show tough love or do you back away wanting a quiet life?
> How do you show love to those outside the Church?
This is Jesus’ command to us. How good at obeying are we?
This sermon was first preached in the Metropolitan Community Church of Manchester. Click here for further information.