Photo by Jeremy Bezanger on Upsplash
Valentine’s Day attracts a lot of superficial talk about love, but it strikes a chord in that we all want love in our lives. Maybe the holiday reminds us of how much we wish – and against all experience to the contrary – expect love to be simple: hearts, flowers, chocolates, and tender I love you’s.
But our lives teach us that love is anything but simple. True, it can often begin as an easy thing. Falling in love, cuddling a sweet, cooing baby, playing with an adorable puppy require no effort from us. Rather, we find loving irresistible under such circumstances. As time goes on, however, the loving gets harder and more complicated. We get confused between the memory of the “nice” moments of easy loving and the challenges of loving people who disappoint us and even hurt us.
Yet, even as we mature enough to accept the complexity of our various love relationships, part of us still wants our God relationship to remain straightforward. We want to agree to love the Lord and have God love us back by making things go our way. But God refuses to let us collapse the divine relationship to that shallowness.
God begins by expressing the divine love as parental. “Our Father,” Jesus teaches us to pray. Hopefully, this picture evokes the tenderness of parents adoring their newborn. But because we all have human parents, the image can degrade to one of disapproval, punishment, even detachment, or abandonment. Jesus counters these notions when He reminds us: “If your child asks for a fish, do you scare him with a live snake? As bad (shall I interpret, imperfect) as you are, you wouldn’t think of such a thing. … So don’t you think the God who conceived you in love will be even better?” (Matthew 7:10-11).
Better love refrains from keeping learning stress-free. God refuses to coddle us with easy to digest milk once we’re ready for solid food. The Lord’s loving nature insists that we do the work of thinking, deciding, and acting. Consider the example that Jesus sets in His encounters with others. He never merely heals physical infirmities without simultaneously engaging the person’s heart and soul. At the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem, He asks the sick man, “Do you want to be made well?” (John 5:2-9). He demands that the woman who touches His robe identify herself and then praises her faith (Mark 5:25-34).
Between His parables and clever counters to the Pharisees’ attempts to trap Him, Jesus challenges us to think more deeply. Is it legal to do good on the Sabbath? Who is your neighbor? Who is without sin? He won’t even honor John the Baptist’s request for an affirmation that He is the Messiah, but instead points to the reports John has heard about – how the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear – and passes it back to John to figure out (Luke 7:22).
Why does God want us to work this hard?
While scripture paints God’s love most often as parental, it holds other metaphors as well. Consider Hosea who must endure his wife’s betrayals and thereby show us the lover’s pain the Lord bears when we reject the One by pursuing other gods. The book of Revelation names the church as the bride of Christ. God not only loves us as an adoring father or mother, but also as a partner in love. The Old Testament even dubs Abraham and Moses “friends of God.”
Although we are so far from being peers with the divine, all these scriptural markers indicate that ultimately, God wants us to grow into friends. This is the relationship with the Lord that Jesus already has and mirrors for us in His earthly life. And isn’t this the dream of earthly parents – that their children will eventually grow into friends?
In the opening of Genesis, the Lord pronounces all creation good. The story of Adam and Eve that follows explains the Fall – the consequence of giving humans’ free will. It’s a high stakes gamble: give creatures the license to do as they please in order to enlist them as partners. And then, for those who sign on, tolerating our blundering collaboration to serve as God’s hands and feet in the world. Sounds kind of crazy, don’t you think?
Yet this is the paradox God’s love presents to us: the One who knows the odds risks it all to find in each of us a someday friend. That’s some kind of love!
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