Agape

Our culture is confused about love.

Certainly there’s no shortage of references to the concept. We sing about love, read about love, and dream about love. We search for it (often in all the wrong places), celebrate when we find it, and grieve when we lose it. One of the biggest holidays of the year commemorates our apparent obsession with love. Christmas centers on toys and Easter prompts new clothing, but Valentine’s Day is all about love–and chocolate, or possibly a love of chocolate.

Maybe that’s the problem–we use the word so much that it’s almost become meaningless. Someone once said that the difference between a friend and a lover is that when a friend says, “I love you,” you understand precisely what he means. I love chocolate, I love my wife, and I love the Yankees, not necessarily in that order and hopefully not in the same way.

The ancient Greeks used three different words that we translate as “love.” Eros connoted erotic love, the wonderfully confusing, ooey-gooey feeling that seems to appear and vanish with the wind. Philos described familial love. The distinction clarifies how I love my brother, though I’m still not sure where chocolate fits.

But the word used in the Bible for “love” is agape. This depicts self-sacrificial love, the kind of love that’s a choice rather than a feeling or an obligation. When I claim that Relentless Grace is about LOVE, this is the sort of love I’m describing.

Agape is the love that radiates outward from its source. As anyone who’s ever “been in love” knows, eros contains no organized pattern. Erotic love is a chaotic, intense crashing of waves that toss us in a dozen directions simultaneously. Philos is no less confusing, because families include a variety of confusing, conflicting dynamics. We love our families, but few of us would characterize them as a neatly organized series of concentric circles.

Agape is love born of a conscious decision to care for another. Agape involves giving, not receiving. Agape tosses a stone into the pond without knowing with absolute certainty where the ripples will travel. Agape is a way of living, a faith that this sort of love always works for eventual good.

Relentless Grace is a story of agape. The characters loved an unloveable person; their unselfish kindness still ripples across the surface of my life.

“Now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.” (1 Corinthians 13:13)

Question: What are your thoughts about the distinction between love as a feeling and love as a choice?