Looking for Love
In a final flurry of questions hurled at Jesus by His opponents during the last week of His earthly ministry, prior to His crucifixion, the one query that convinced them to give up had to do with love. Actually, the question didn’t concern love, but Jesus’ answer went there, and they had no comeback. Jesus’ love and His unique application of it was and is so disarming that it is one of the reasons the Greatest Commandment has everything to do with it.
Often, to understand the true power of Christ’s love, we have to unlearn the counterfeit versions our culture engrains in us. Our observance of Valentine’s Day might serve as one good example. It got its name from Saint Valentine, a Roman Catholic bishop, who is said to have been martyred on February 14, somewhere around the fifth or sixth century. But this isn’t about him, it’s about love, one of the most misunderstood words in our language, making Valentine’s Day a somewhat confusing, rather shallow holiday—if you can call it a holiday (since no one gets it off and nothing closes to honor it). Hallmark cards, See’s candies, restaurants and many jewelers look forward to it, in anticipation of padding their bottom lines, all in the name of love?
Christ’s love, of course, goes beyond bouquets of flowers and boxes of candies. It is not the kind of “love” promoted on Valentine’s Day, which generally consists of warm fuzzy feelings and teddy bears. It ascends to the highest heights: “God is love” (1 John 4:16). We know that ultimately, when people are looking for love in places other than in God, they are looking in all the wrong places.
Christians come to the understanding that our word, “love” falls far short in expressing the true breadth of what the Bible means by love. The original biblical languages have multiple words that we translate into our one word “love.” “I love pizza,” sounds the same as, “I love my wife.” But I’d be in big trouble if I ever mistook Wendi for pizza; if I loved her like I “love” a Toppers combo supreme! Thus, our culture seems hopelessly confused about love, groping in the darkness to fulfill this deep need for real love, calling things like lust “love.”
This past weekend, Hollywood held the Academy Awards. I was reminded of the talented and very promising Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who died several years ago from an apparent heroin overdose. Too many celebrities have gone too soon in a similar fashion. He was only 46. Just a year earlier, Hoffman had played the part of Willy Loman in the play Death of a Salesman. He stated in an interview that Loman represents, “The idea that you have a vision of what you’re supposed to be, or where your kids are going to be—and that that doesn’t work out.” Then Hoffman concluded, “What are we doing, family, work, friends, hopes, dreams, careers, what's happiness, what's success, what does it mean, is it important, how do you get it? …Ultimately what gets you up in the morning is to be loved.”
Hoffman was right. What gets us up in the morning is to be loved—but it is to be loved by the One who first loved us. It’s not about chasing the love of fans, the adulation of a crowd or seeking a new spouse once one “falls out of love.” There’s a desperation to fill a love-shaped void only God can fill. Drugs won’t fill it.
He is the One who so loved us that He gave. Until we learn His kind of love—the kind we can only experience through a relationship with Him and then extend to others—we are chasing after a counterfeit. Every other kind of love longs at its core for that love.
That love, agape love, disarms. That love silences the critics. That love put Jesus’ opponents in a position where “No one was able to answer Him a word,” nor “dare from that day on to ask Him another question” (Matt. 22:46). That love put Jesus on the cross for you.
“But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” —Romans 5:8