Friday of the Fifth Week of Easter
Evangelist Billy Graham once said, "Being a Christian is more than just an instantaneous conversion - it is a daily process whereby you grow to be more and more like Christ." I think he's got it right - I find I'm constantly being converted and I'm never done converting. One of the ways I'm being converted is in how I understand love. I think I'm learning, over a lifetime, what it means to love other people and to be loved by other people and of course, scriptures like the ones we've read today help in that conversion.
I used to think of love mostly as an emotion - that "special something" in a romantic relationship, or a feeling of general good will toward my parents, my siblings, and my friends.But a scripture like today's passage from Acts (15:22-31) reminds me that love is not primarily an emotion. The Jewish apostles in Jerusalem send emissaries to Gentile Christians because they have heard that the people are being stirred up emotionally, in bad ways, by evangelists who have not been sent from Jerusalem. We know from Paul's letters how these Christians are being stirred up: other Jewish Christians have been telling the Gentile Christians that they must be circumcised according to Jewish law, and an assortment of other laws that must have seemed foreign and restrictive and impossible to follow. I could well imagine that these people are feeling despair or anxiety: how Jewish do they really have to be to follow the Christ?
Given that background, it is very important, then, that the Jewish apostles are trying to bring calm to the Gentile Christians and soothe their fears. The apostles are acting out of love, rather than respond to the rampant emotions that are running high among the people. Love is an action.
More than that, the passage from Acts tells us that an action of love can be directed toward a whole group of people. I used to think that love was really between just two people, or maybe a family, but that love couldn't be for a larger group, exactly because I saw it as an emotion. But here we see that we can do loving acts for whole groups of people. God's love is larger and broader than our human cultures (including those early Jewish and Greek cultures) tend to define it.
The passage from Acts is a result of these people having heard the gospel, passages just like the one we read today (John 15:12-17). Jesus' great commandment is to "love one another." How do we love? By treating others as friends. Elsewhere Jesus has discussed loving enemies, loving God with all our hearts and minds, loving our neighbor as ourselves. How can we love all these disparate groups of people, practically speaking?
We cannot do so if love is merely an emotion. We cannot will ourselves to have feelings of good will toward enemies, for example. But if we see love as an action, that opens up a lot of ways in which we might be loving toward our enemies even if our emotions do not quite match who it is God wants us to be.
This week, let us be open to acts of love - both the ones others do for us, and the actions we ought to be doing for others in the name of Christ.
- Jana M. Bennett