How Unprovoked is Your Love?
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Unprovoked violence...we see it in the news. How unprovoked will our love be this week? I just read an article by Tim Keller. He sees that question in a great light:
In 1 Peter, Peter says, "Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins."
He says love is the crowning virtue.
The word that Peter uses for love is agape, a word the New Testament writers made famous. It wasn't really used and didn't even have a particularly positive connotation until the biblical writers got a hold of it and used it, in numerous contexts, to describe the love of God and the love we're to show as we grow in our knowledge and experience of God. Often agape has been described as unconditional love-love that is without condition, love that is not earned, love that we did not see coming and did not have coming. It is unexpected. It is unannounced. It is unmerited. It just comes to you.
When you think about it, most love that operates in the human realm is conditional. It's an if/then. If you love me back or if you do nothing to forfeit my love, if you're beautiful or attractive, if you're something, then I will love or continue to love. The way human love (and most love) tends to operate is that there is a feeling of attraction, thankfulness, or some kind of emotion, and the fruit of that emotion is a decision: "Because I feel this way, I will love you." The decision can transcend the emotion, but it's never very far from that emotion. It's the "if" thing: "I feel attraction, therefore I choose to love you. If I stop feeling attraction, my love will maybe shrink in proportion to that."
What agape does is completely reverse the terms of that. Agape is not emotionless; it's just that the emotion follows the decision. In other words, it's a fruit of the decision. There's a choice that's been made; I choose to love. And on the basis of that choice, emotion rises. But the choice is a fundamental. The choice is the thing that's in place regardless of the emotion. The emotion rides on the decision.
Now here's where agape gets very interesting. It's far more stubborn than that I simply choose to love and therefore feel loving. It actually pursues the object of its love. It is loving even in the face of resistance, even in the face of behavior where another emotion might be more expected. So agape will love in the face of rebellion, in the face of rejection, in the face of rank badness. It's this amazing form of love that has made a decision, and the decision is final. It's set. And on that basis of that decision, whether it's met with loving, good behavior or not, it continues to pursue in love.
That's how we normally talk about agape. And that's a good way to talk about it. But here's something that I think is an even a simpler way to understand it: agape is unprovoked love. Normally, when we hear of something unprovoked, we think of anger, attack, aggression, or violence. When we hear about that unprovoked aggression, we say there was nothing in the person who was the recipient of the attack that in any way had this coming to him or her. We have to ascribe the act of unprovoked violence to the perpetrator. There's something twisted and wrong in them. There's something broken and skewed in them; they're working out this deep anger, and you just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's in them. That's how we account for unprovoked violence.
I want to call agape unprovoked love, and it works on the same principle, just in the opposite direction. And just as with unprovoked violence, when we seek to understand unprovoked love, we look for the explanation not in the object of love, but in the one who loves. We say there must be something going on in them, something deep down, that accounts for this kind of act.
The Father's an agape lover. The Father is a lover who loves what he loves not based on the loveliness of the object, but on some quality within him. In a sense, he can't help himself, though he does choose it. He loves because he is, John says, love.
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