An honest conversation on how we show love.
[6-minute read]
What is love?
Honestly. Think really hard about it before you answer because I bet that whatever you come up with is going to be different from whoever is sitting next to you (if you can even think of an answer – it’s honestly pretty hard for a lot of people).
How do you think a 6-year old would answer this question? Fortunately for you, dear reader, I’ve actually found some quotes from them. Here’s how a few 4-8 year olds describe love:
“I don’t know how to answer that question.” Love the honesty, Little Man. Sometimes I don’t know, either.
“Love feels kind of nice.” I think so, too. Or at least I hope so.
“Love is about happiness.” Copied and pasted straight from a Disney movie script.
“If a boy is mean to girls, that means they have a crush on you.” Honestly, did this come from a 4-year old or a college student?
Sure, these are funny. And I work with middle schoolers, so I can only imagine how they would describe love. But can I be real? I think these kids are describing what the majority of us believe about love in a way that is remarkably more honest than we adults would ever be. A 4-year old doesn’t just “get” what the word “love” should mean (When was the last time you saw a toddler share without being told? That kind of moment goes viral online because it’s so rare). They’re regurgitating what their parents and others around them are telling and showing them. Honestly, how heartbreaking is it to know that this precious little 5-year old girl is already saying things like “boys show that they like you by being mean to you”??? Who told her that? Who’s telling the boys at her school that?
We’re teaching kids this, and yet we wonder why rape culture is still a problem. But I digress.
Honestly, the word “love” is a problem in 2021’s version of Western culture. Why? Because everyone is worshiping the Self above all. Yourself is your highest authority. So love can mean anything to anyone anywhere at anytime and we’re just expected to not only be okay with it but to also figure out everyone else’s definition of love on our own. That sentence was even exhausting to write, let alone live out.
This makes things super confusing when Jesus says this in the Sermon on the Mount:
“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,”
Matthew 5:43-44 ESV
Depending on who you ask, Jesus could be saying to make your enemies happy or to vote them into office or feed them, or evidently if you ask that little girl from earlier, to even be mean to them (which is directly counter to his first point???).
Like I said, exhausting.
Friendships, romantic relationships, families, and so many others are falling apart all over the world because nobody is willing to put a foot down and make a definition for love. We don’t want to hurt people, and we don’t want to be seen as being exclusive, but honestly people, you do realize that unless you’re exclusive, you can’t define anything, right? To define something for what it is will by nature exclude whatever it’s not. If I want to tell you what an iPhone is, I have to distinguish it as different and exclusive from an Android and vice versa. Otherwise, everything is the same and nothing matters (And yes, there are people who believe everything is one, but even they can’t practically live that out. Quit playing games, y’all).
So what is love? Because if Jesus is using it like we do, then there’s some serious ambiguity to work through here because I love BBQ sauce and I love my wife but that is nowhere close to the same thing.
Luckily for us, Jesus was not doing that. He spoke in a language called Aramaic, cousin to Hebrew in the same way Portuguese is to Spanish; close, but not the same. The word Jesus most likely would’ve used for “love” here was called “rakhmah”. But when Matthew wrote down the story of Jesus’s life, he did it in Greek. By then, looking back over Jesus’s life and actions, Matthew chose to use the Greek word “agape” here (As did literally every other New Testament author – it occurs 52 times in 1st John alone). What is agape?
The Bible Project puts it really well when they say that agape is “a choice that you make to seek the well-being of people other than yourself” (1). Jesus showed this in everything that He did, and according to Matthew 5, Jesus thinks the ultimate test of your ability to love is determined by how you treat the people you can’t stand, regardless whether your anger with them is justified.
Another way of saying this is that love is “giving someone what they need the most when they deserve it the least.” Sometimes we’re angry with others because they genuinely wronged us, and their treatment of us legitimately deserves judgment. These kinds people are really easy to hate. “You wronged me, so you’re cancelled,” we say. Or we live out; honestly, it doesn’t really matter how it comes out, we all think it.
The definitions the kids gave make a lot of sense when the person you love is someone who loves you. But it is everywhere around us and in us that if someone doesn’t love us back, they’re not worth our time. Showing love to people who could never and will never repay us looks, sounds, and feels stupid.
Don’t even try to convince yourself you’ve never been that person. You probably haven’t been able to make it a full week without being this person even a little bit. I know I sure haven’t. The only people we want as friends or in our family are people who only ever love us back. But like I said earlier, without a standard, not only is this confusing as heck, it’s literally impossible. Someone may very well think they’re showing you love by bringing up a hard truth that the two of you need to work through, but you’ll say it’s not love because it hurts. At the same time, your other “friend” will be asking you to sin to stay friends with them, or at least making things awkward if you try to do life Jesus’s way around them, and you’ll do whatever they want or whatever they’re doing just because you want them to like you.
Honestly, we’re all middle schoolers in our hearts in this way.
I get it. It’s really hard to give someone what they need when they have clearly done many things that 100% disqualify them from any kind of love or grace or blessing. Often, it hurts. Especially when it takes them a long time to figure out what you’re actually trying to do. But do a quick little thought experiment with me for a second;
What if God treated us this way? What if God only loved the people who loved Him first?
Y’all, that world would be terrifying. You know why? You sure as heck didn’t start off your life loving God. You only know you can love Him at all because He showed His love first.
In a world where God waited to show love until we showed it to Him first, chaos would reign, destruction running rampant and pain and evil dominating, totally unchecked. No form of joy, however small, would exist. No happiness would ever light up the darkness, and death would be the unavoidable end for all humanity.
But that’s not what happened.
“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
Isaiah 61:1 ESV
because the Lord has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor;
he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of the prison to those who are bound.”
“For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another. But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.”
Titus 3:3-7 ESV
Jesus says in Matthew 5 that we need to love, agape, the people who we can’t stand. And I don’t know if you knew this, but Jesus never usually gives a command without giving a why behind it (so if you’re the kind of person who can’t follow a God who requests blind faith from His followers, you can rest assured that the God of the Bible is nowhere close to that kind of God). Look at verse 45:
“…so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.”
Matthew 5:45 ESV
Genesis 1, literally page 1 of the Bible, reveals that you and I were made in the image of God by His own hands (1:27). You were made to reflect God to the rest of creation. So why love the people you can’t stand?
Because that’s exactly what God did for you.
Even though your life is full of reasons for Him to hate you, He doesn’t:
“For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Romans 5:7-8 ESV
Jesus’s why when He says to love your enemies is literally so that you will be close to God – so you will fulfill the purpose for which you were made. You exist to love and give the people around you what they need the most, even though they definitely don’t deserve it.
You’ll never know the truth of this unless you choose to live it out. Jesus isn’t asking you to fully wrap your heart around this idea. All He’s asking is that you trust Him to put it into practice anyway. You’ll start to see the fruit as you do. If it wasn’t legit, it would’ve died out a long time ago. But Jesus’s way is still here, still changing lives and changing hearts literally thousands of years after He walked on the dirt of Israel, still as relevant as ever.
The power is in being humble enough to admit you needed help in the first place, not in picking and choosing who gets your love and who doesn’t. But you gotta get past yourself enough at the start to even begin experiencing it.
So, who irks you? Who gets on your last nerve? Go give them what they need. Right now. Help them. Sacrifice something of yourself to do it. See if Jesus was right.
Only you can know for yourself for sure. What will you do?
Ty Hirsch 