Agape: An Unearned Love

C.S. Lewis regarded agape love as the great­est of the four loves¹. It is the kind of love Christ exem­pli­fied in his life and teach­ing. Author Richard L. Strauss notes that, “it is a love which keeps lov­ing when its object is unre­spon­sive, unkind, unlov­able, or com­pletely unwor­thy… it gives one hun­dred per­cent and expects noth­ing in return!“² It is a seem­ingly impos­si­ble love, yet a reflec­tion of God’s love for us. It is a kind of love, as Peter Kreeft notes, that “goes beyond worth, beyond jus­tice, beyond rea­son“³ . In the words of C.S. Lewis, it is a gift-love from God to us:

God, who needs noth­ing, loves into exis­tence wholly super­flu­ous crea­tures in order that He may love and per­fect them. He cre­ates the uni­verse, already fore­see­ing — of should we say ‘see­ing’? there are no tenses in God — the bussing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails dri­ven through the mesial nerve, the repeated incip­i­ent suf­fo­ca­tion as the body droops, the repeated tor­ture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath’s sake, hitched up. If I may dare the bio­log­i­cal image, God is a ‘host’ who delib­er­ately cre­ates His own par­a­sites; causes us to be that we may exploit and ‘take advan­tage of’ Him. Herein is love. This is the dia­gram of Love Him­self, the inven­tor of all loves⁴.

 
It is through the life of Christ that we expe­ri­ence a God of love, a God who is love⁵. Remark­ing on the love Christ had for oth­ers, Kreeft goes on to say, “Jesus had dif­fer­ent feel­ings toward dif­fer­ent peo­ple. But he loved them all equally and absolutely”. The real­ity of this love is clear, and the teach­ing is dif­fi­cult. While our feel­ings towards peo­ple may be dif­fer­ent, we, as fol­low­ers of Christ, are to love every­one equally and absolutely⁶, inde­pen­dent of our feel­ings for them: our friends, ene­mies, fam­ily, strangers. We can­not on the one hand say we love God and on the other, hate our brother⁷, curse our enemy, or ignore the stranger ⁸. In the words of Christ, “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“⁹ . Christ does not com­mand us to love some abstract ideal, ‘human­ity’. Rather, he tells us to love our neigh­bours and our ene­mies, the “real indi­vid­u­als we meet, just as he did”; Christ lived a life of rela­tion­ship, he died not for the sins of an abstract con­cept, but for you and me, per­son­ally, our friends, fam­ily, even our ene­mies¹⁰ . This, as C.S. Lewis says, is love.

We are left with a ques­tion: how can God be love? The answer is that God is love because God is a trin­ity. If God is not a trin­ity, God is not love. As Kreeft notes, “love requires three things: a lover, a beloved, and a rela­tion­ship between them. If God were only one per­son, he could be a lover, but not love itself“¹¹ . If God were not love, but only a lover, then it would be that God is incom­plete with­out us, need­ing us, requir­ing some­one to love. God’s love would then not be agape love, but a self­ish love of his own need, need­ing some­one to love¹².
It is here that we must be care­ful to avoid con­fu­sion between ‘God is love’ and ‘Love is God’. A God who is love shows us a love we don’t know. A love that is God shows us a love we already know. In this we divinize a love not wor­thy of deity. We turn the per­sonal God into an imper­sonal force; the love of God becomes human love, rather than human love reflect­ing the love of God. Kreeft says it best, “‘God is love’ is the pro­found­est thing we have ever heard. But ‘love is God’ is deadly non­sense“¹³ .

It is to this life of rela­tion­ship and love that Christ calls us. A love that, as lived by Christ, is to be prac­ticed every day, hon­estly and authen­ti­cally. Those we meet in the street, those we dis­like and those we con­sider our ene­mies are, like us, cre­ated in the very image of God¹⁴ . We show this love to oth­ers because God first showed it to us¹⁵ ; “we love, because He first loved us“¹⁶ . The very nature of God is love and it is this nature that pro­ceeds from Him to us. In the words of the Apos­tle John, “in this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the pro­pi­ti­a­tion for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is per­fected in us“¹⁷ . It is a love which nec­es­sar­ily finds its ori­gin in God’s nature; it is from this that we derive our agape. Said dif­fer­ently, God’s love is pri­mary, ours is sec­ondary; deriv­a­tive of God’s. Just as God’s love encom­passed all¹⁸ , so too should ours. Every­one is our neighbour.

A teacher of the Mosaic law once approached and asked Christ what the fore­most com­mand­ment was. In reply, Christ answered with what we now regard as the two great commandments:

The fore­most is, ‘HEAR, O ISRAEL! THE LORD OUR GOD IS ONE LORD; AND YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND, AND WITH ALL YOUR STRENGTH.’ “The sec­ond is this, YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.’ There is no other com­mand­ment greater than these¹⁹ .

In his reply, Christ brings together Deuteron­omy 6:4–5 (the Shema) and Leviti­cus 19:18 ²⁰ , show­ing that these two com­mand­ments are insep­a­ra­ble. Christ taught that “love of neigh­bour is a nat­ural and log­i­cal out­growth of love of God“²¹ . If we claim to know and love God, that love will be man­i­fest in our deal­ings with oth­ers; it is a wit­ness to our rela­tion­ship with God. What is inter­est­ing to real­ize is that the Greek word Christ uses for love, aga­pao, is the verb form of agape. The love of God, fol­lowed by the love of one’s neigh­bour, is there­fore very much an active rather than a pas­sive love. It is an action, rather than an idea²² . A love that requires our whole being: our heart, soul, mind and strength. With this in mind Lewis spoke sim­ply and pow­er­fully, “it is prob­a­bly impos­si­ble to love any human being sim­ply ‘too much’. We may love him too much in pro­por­tion to our love for God; but it is the small­ness of our love for God, not the great­ness of our love for the man, that con­sti­tutes the inor­di­nacy“²³ . Love has a foun­da­tion, and as we see in the writ­ings of Lewis, John and the words of Christ, that foun­da­tion is God Himself.

Some may ask why lov­ing our neigh­bours requires lov­ing our ene­mies. The answer is sim­ple: to Jesus our neigh­bours were “any­one with whom we have deal­ings at all“²⁴, this includes our ene­mies. In pro­vid­ing a prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tion of this, Mit­ton remarks that neigh­bour embraces:

All within our home, those we meet at work, in our church, and in recre­ations. And more than that: our employer is our neigh­bour too; so are our work peo­ple, all who serve us in shops, the men who empty our dust bins and those who try to keep streets and parks clean. So too are the peo­ple of Jamaica, of West Africa, of Kenya, of Ger­many and of Rus­sia. If we love our neigh­bours as we love our­selves, we shall want for them the treat­ment we should want for our­selves, were we in their place²⁵ .

Agape love is a love that nec­es­sar­ily requires the love of ene­mies, fam­ily, friends, strangers, because all of us are made in the image of God. It is a love which is deriv­a­tive of God’s love, an out­ward man­i­fes­ta­tion of our rela­tion­ship with Him. Agape nec­es­sar­ily requires the love of every­one, because it is this sort of love that Jesus showed, com­manded and expected. Agape love, is Divine love.

Related posts:

1. Love is com­plete acceptance?
2. Love Your Neighbour?
3. Some Thoughts on Love Wins
4. C.S. Lewis on the cost of love, and avoid­ing God.
5. A God of love?