LOVING OTHERS & COMMUNION: INTEGRATION OF THE THREE LOVES
This week, I would highlight two more chapter introductions: Loving others & Communion.
Introduction to Loving Others
When it comes to loving my neighbors, my life is like a roller coaster ride going up and down, jerking side to side, and sometimes making a giant loop or two. It is a wild and unpredictable mixture of loving wrongly to loving rightly and loving conditionally to loving unconditionally or vice versa. I know I have not arrived.
The biblical faith can only exist as translated into a culture. One of the foundational problems in life and missions is that we try to make others love God like we do, believe as we do, behave as we do.
Thus, one of the hardest teachings of Jesus is to love our neighbors, much less love our enemies. Our “neighbors” are as expansive as the entire humanity and as intimate as our family, and everyone in between. In the Book of Leviticus (19:33-34), our neighbors are “foreigners,” meaning people who are completely different from us. Jesus reemphasized this point by including the Samaritans, who were detested by the Jews as neighbors. As I said, it is a hard teaching to follow.
We are to love as Jesus loved. Loving others foremost means giving them freedom to be who they are created to be without forcing them to be like us. Loving others also means we empower them to love their God with their own heart, soul, mind, and strength. As we do this, we witness creations and strengthening of communities that are safe, authentic, and loving, exuding the love of Christ beyond to draw more people into communities. Thomas Merton succinctly captured, “the beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise, we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”
Loving others and loving ourselves are intricately interdependent. “The man who respects his own originality has a respectful eye for the originality of others,”[1] Adrian Van Kaam wrote. This “respectful eye” is contrasted by the “condemning eye” we are to guard against (Matthew 7:1-5). As we accept and celebrate our own uniqueness and worth, we extend the same grace to others. Both my worth and others’ worth are ultimately God-given, so there is no room for boasting or feeling inferior, stemming from an endless game of comparison and competition.
In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis penned wise words, “The rule for us all is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.”
When we love our neighbor as ourselves, we are an answer to our own prayer, “Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
[1] This quote is from Van Kaam’s book, Living Creatively: How to Discover Your Sources of Originality and Self-Motivation, page 13.
Communion: Integration of the Three Loves
There is no greater vision, calling, and destination than to be in union with God as followers of Jesus. In the garden of Gethsemane (John 17), Jesus prayed the ultimate vision of humanity’s end goal: to be one with God. When we pursue being united with God, we become living answers to Jesus’ prayer.
Union with God can be summarized in one word, love. As God is love, as we become one with God, we become love. We were all created by Love toward Love. Love is both the essence of our existence and the vision of our calling. This love is outlined by Jesus as loving God, loving ourselves, and loving our neighbors. To become love is to love everything God loves and in the way God loves.
In order to pursue and become love, we must seek comm-union with God, ourselves, and with others.
For much of my adult life, I was taught to die, sacrifice, and surrender myself for the sake of God and others. It took a significant revelation to realize that I was part of the world God loves. Somehow, I detached myself from the world God loves and acted as if I stood outside of the world. I realized over time I acted as if I did not need God’s love after my “salvation”. I also realized that was a rejection of God’s indwelling and continual love. I was too good and worthy to need God’s love. How arrogant and blasphemous I was!
To be in comm-union with myself is the most misunderstood and thus difficult challenge, especially for evangelicals. To be in union with myself is to be in union with Christ who is in me. Thus, Christ in me and I are not separated. Christ in me recognizes Christ in others and vice versa and thus create union with others. Communion with all three loves cannot be separated, and they grow in unison, which fulfills the prayer of Jesus.