Herein is Love

R >> Reuel L. Howe >> Herein is Love

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The relationship between man and man, therefore, not only is important
to men, but also is a part of God's plan for the reconciliation of the
world unto Himself. It is given to us for our own sakes and also for the
accomplishment of God's purposes. Unfortunately, however, our relating
to one another often is hurtful because of our anxiety and insecurity.
We may attack others in order to make ourselves feel secure. Instead of
calling them forth, we cause them to withdraw. Even when we undertake to
love others, we may do it in ways that hurt them, because we love them
for selfish reasons. Human relationships, in themselves, are ambiguous,
and we need deliverance from the ambiguity of them, for these
relationships can either destroy people or call them forth.

_Human Love Is Ambiguous_

Furthermore, because human love can be ambiguous, we do not know whether
it is safe to give and accept love. It is a risk both to love and to
accept love, and all of us, to some degree, are afraid to take the risk.
Some people, to be sure, have more courage for it than others. They love
more courageously, and are more courageous in their acceptance of
others' love. These people seem to have a power of being that others
lack.

The giving and receiving of love implies responsibility for one another,
and we may withhold our love and reject the love of others as a way of
evading the responsibility of love. We are willing to love up to the
point where it begins to be inconvenient to love any more. We like the
image of ourselves as loved and loving people, but we would like the
benefit without the responsibilities of the role. When the response to
our love presents us with demands, we may begin to hold people off. We
may say: "Yes, to be sure, I love you, but keep your distance. I am
willing to give of myself, but not too much. I need to keep something of
me for myself." By this attitude we are admitting that when we love
another we have to give ourselves to him, entrust ourselves to him.
Commitment to another person is a courageous act, and it is no wonder
that we sometimes recoil from it.

What has been said about giving love is equally true of accepting love,
for the acceptance of love also calls for trust and commitment. If I
really respond to your love, I will open myself to the possibility of
being hurt because your love cannot be completely trusted. Furthermore,
if you should really love me, I am not worthy of your love and I do not
welcome the judgment of me that is implicit in your love. I shall,
therefore, make a cautious response to you and give myself to you
guardedly. Then the person who is giving love is made lonely because his
gift is not accepted. He, too, begins to withdraw and to dole out his
love, which in turn increases the anxiety of the one to whom it is being
given. This is an aspect of human fellowship which we need to recognize
before we talk much about Christian fellowship. Human fellowship is both
heroic and tragic; it is both renewing and destructive; it is both
healing and hurtful, but it is indispensable to life. This is our human
predicament.

Something is needed to cut into the ambiguity of human love. And this is
what Christ does. He draws the confused currents of human love into the
unifying stream of divine love, thus making possible a new relationship.
As the apostle Paul makes clear, we become new creatures in Christ, and
as such, a part of a new creation.[7]

Having considered some of the characteristics of human love and
fellowship, let us now look at Christian love and fellowship. One word
of caution is needed before we begin. The fellowship of Christian men
and women will still have its human look, but something new has been
added that makes a difference. What is it? How shall we describe the new
relationship?

_What Is Christian Fellowship?_

Christian fellowship is the relation of men and women who, by the power
of the Holy Spirit, participate in the life and work of Christ.
Christian living is participation in the continued living of Christ
through the activity of His Spirit. This concept stands in sharp
contrast to the ones held by the church members described in the first
chapter. The source of the Christian's life is not knowledge about God
or even our historical remembrance of His incarnate life, although they
contribute to it. Neither is it to be found in a determined imitation of
Christ's life, although that effort also will help. Nor is it in the
good will of man which, along with his power of love, is likewise found
to be ambiguous. No, the true source of the Christian life and of the
Christian relationship is the incarnation of His Spirit in the lives of
men. The presence and working of His Spirit transforms our own spirit
and provides a new dynamic for our living. This does not mean that we
cease to be human; the old conflicts are still there and the old battles
must continue to be fought, but a new power of being and of love is
given to us by the indwelling Spirit.

Just now we referred to the incarnation of His Spirit in us. The concept
of incarnation is an ancient one in Christianity, and represents the
embodiment of God in the human form of the historic Jesus, Who
participated in the life of man as man in order that man, through Him,
might participate in the Being of God. What happened is known to us all.
The incarnation produced the life of Jesus, His death, resurrection, and
the coming of His Spirit. These are not once-for-all historic events as
was the life of Julius Caesar or of George Washington. Through Him a new
power of love was released into life that continues unto this day. B.C.
and A.D. are not merely a way of dividing time, but are our way of
acknowledging that in the life of Jesus of Nazareth something radically
different entered into life, a new dynamic that changed the nature of
creation. We participate in the historic incarnation of Jesus of
Nazareth which took place 1900 years ago by the daily incarnations of
His Spirit in our individual lives and in the life of the people of God.
And since His incarnation meant God's entry into the world, so likewise
the indwelling of His Spirit in us also should mean God's entry into our
world and into its conflicts and issues.

We are Christians by doing what He did in the world, which was to have a
care and a responsibility for others. His Spirit seeks to incarnate
Himself in the day-to-day decisions of every responsible person in every
sphere of his living. Thus the mother not only serves God by her
decisions and actions in the home, but through these same decisions and
actions she may believe that God is present and accomplishing His
purposes for her and for the members of her family. So, likewise, a
businessman's sphere of Christian action is carried out in the decisions
and work of his business, but also he may believe that in and through
these same decisions and work God seeks to accomplish His purpose. So
the principle of incarnation means that God is both served and met at
the points of decision and responsibility of our daily lives. And this
is what it means to participate in His life by the power of His Spirit,
to bear the true mark of the Christian.

In the context of these thoughts, we may now look at the three parts of
the earthly life of Jesus Christ, and, as we examine them, the idea of
participating in His life may become clearer.

_Participation in the Life of Christ_

First of all, there is His earthly life, the life of the man Jesus, Whom
we call Lord and Savior, the Christ. This life gives us the picture of
what God meant man to be. Here is the perfect portrait of God's
creation--man. It as a stirring picture and we love to look at it,
contemplate it, read about it. It is a dull mind and heart that does not
quicken in response to His amazing compassion and strength; and as we
study his instructions to us, it becomes clear that He expects us to be
to our generation what He was to His.

When we realize what His teaching and commandment require of us, our
sense of the beauty and simplicity of His life is overshadowed by the
terror aroused in us by His expectation of us. We know that the ugliness
of our lives can never reproduce the beauty of His. From a human point
of view, the imitation of Christ is a complete impossibility, and one
wonders how so many Christians can go on, generation after generation,
thinking that this is their task and that they can accomplish it. Yet it
is clear that He expects us to be members of His body and to do His work
in our time. Is it possible that He asked us to do something that is
beyond our powers of accomplishment? If this is so, then far from being
Savior, He is one of the most cruel of men. There must be some other
answer.

The answer, of course, is that Christ did not leave us alone to carry
out His commandments, summed up in the great commandment: "You shall
love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and
with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as
yourself."[8] He understood only too well the ambiguity of our lives.
How understanding He was of vacillating Peter, and yet He called him the
Rock. Had Peter possessed any self-understanding, he must have wondered
why his Lord gave him that name. But after the resurrection and the
coming of the Holy Spirit, Peter became the Rock, because then he
incarnated the Spirit of his Lord. As with Peter, so with us. The
presence of the Spirit makes possible an imitation of Christ. Now we
can read the Gospels without dread, and not as patterns for us to
imitate literally and slavishly. The New Testament provides the
understandings that help us to test whether or not we are responding to
His Spirit and letting Him accomplish His work in and through us. Thus,
like Peter, we may become rocks, incarnating the Spirit of our Lord.

Nor do we need to be embarrassed by our humanity. We begin to sense that
we cannot be Christian without first being human, which means that we
shall be both loving and hostile, both righteous and sinful, both
courageous and cowardly, both dependable and vacillating. We are in the
world and of the world as other men are, and we share the lot of human
existence. But in addition, we have been given the spirit of power and
love and self-control, not that we may be condescending toward the
world, or try to regulate it as if it were a recalcitrant child, but
that we may be embodiments of the Spirit of God in human affairs through
whom He may accomplish His purposes in the world. In the process,
because His Spirit is in us, men will know that they have seen Jesus.

Thus we may come to understand the life of the people of God, and to
find therein a basis for a true evangelism; and thus we may participate
in the life and teaching of Christ, which are at once our ideal and
pattern of living, and at the same time our judgment.

_Participation in the Crucifixion_

Since the life of the Christian is participation in his own time in the
life of Christ, he must participate also in the crucifixion and death of
his Lord, which were a part of His life. Christ's crucifixion and death
were a natural consequence of His teaching and of the way in which He
lived. The acceptance of the unacceptable, the loving of the unlovable,
inevitably produces the necessity of the Cross, which itself must be
chosen and accepted if the life of love is to be triumphant.

We would like to evade this part of Christian living, if that were
possible. The Cross and all that it represents is the part of the
Christian gospel that we would prefer to skip. The lives of church
people reveal only too clearly how much they wish it were possible to
move directly from the contemplation of the ideal to its actualization,
and to bypass the experience of crucifixion and its meaning for us.
Lovers, for example, would like to move from the contemplation of the
romantic ideal of their love to its realization in their lives. But the
full meaning of their love cannot become available to them except as
they pass through the challenges and crises of their relationship and
die to themselves for the sake of the other. Nor can anyone master a
skill or a field of study except as he moves from the vision of what he
_might_ do, to its realization through the path of self-discipline,
which is a kind of dying to himself and to other values which he might
choose and cultivate.

Jesus Christ affirmed by His teaching and life this principle of
disciplined self-giving. If we would be partakers of His resurrection,
we must be willing to be buried with Him in His death. We are expected
to show forth His death till He comes, and we do this by dying daily. In
one sense, the life of the Christian is a life of dying. Being buried
with Christ in His death is symbolized in the act of baptism, especially
when it is administered by immersion and accompanied with such a
Scripture verse as, "We were buried therefore with him by baptism into
death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the
Father, we too might walk in newness of life."[9] In other words we have
to expect the pain of our relationships and accept the responsibility of
them for the sake of the glory in them that may be revealed later. We
are to accept the unacceptable in ourselves and in others, because on
the cross Christ accepted the unacceptable in all men. This is what
produced the Cross. And so He died, bearing the sin of man while He
perfectly fulfilled His own teaching; that is, He was perfectly obedient
to the full meaning of love. We too have to die daily to our desire for
peace at any price, to our desire to work out convenient and comfortable
compromises, and to our desire to be God and to have things run our own
way. Thus, we come to realize the meaning of His words, "Whoever loses
his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it."[10]

The Christian fellowship, therefore, is the fellowship of men and
women who accept dying as a part of living, and who are not surprised
by the presence in human relations of selfishness, betrayals,
misrepresentations, hostility, and all other violations of the ideal.
When we meet these things, we should not run away, or pretend that such
conditions do not exist. Instead, we should face these hostile and
negative human responses with courage. Because we are participating in
the life of our Lord, we may move through these experiences, knowing
that nothing can really separate us from the love of God which seeks to
make itself known in and through our relations with one another. We may
trust that if we accept the pain that we have in our relations with one
another and are obedient to the spirit of the love that seeks to reunite
man with man, we may emerge on the farther side of the painful
experience with relationships that are richer, deeper, and stronger than
they were before.

An excellent illustration of this principle is to be found in Tennessee
Williams' play, _Cat on a Hot Tin Roof_, the point of which many people
miss because of what they regard to be the vulgarity, profanity, and
licentiousness of its characters. In the play, Brock, the son, evaded
his problems with himself, his father, his wife, and his work through an
excessive use of alcohol. His father, Big Daddy, in his rough, profane
way was greatly concerned about his son. Finally, in a tremendous scene
between Big Daddy and Brock, the father pursued his son through every
kind of evasion and rationalization in a determined effort to break
through to his heart. Nothing that Brock could say to his father was
sufficient to cause Big Daddy to turn away. He could easily have
abandoned his sick boy and evaded the pain of what he was trying to do.
Instead, he hammered at the door of Brock's life with a love that was
willing to accept every rejection that his son could offer. And he did
not give up. Finally, he broke through, reached his boy, and brought him
back to his life with his family and his work. Because he was willing to
die to himself and every comfortable impulse. Big Daddy was freed to be
the instrument of a saving love. Here was a dramatic portrayal of the
truth which our Lord not only taught but exemplified, and which He would
like to see reproduced in the lives of all of us.

Incidentally, it is ironical that so many Christian people missed the
real message of this play because they were so easily offended by that
which is not pretty in human life. It is a shame that we would rather be
pretty than redemptive. We seem to place respectability above salvation.
Christians ought to be able to see through and behind the dirty and
sinful ways in which people live, and recognize them as symptoms of a
spiritual condition that calls for that which God is trying to give them
through us. It is tragic that some would-be Christians, like Mrs.
Strait, become so moralistic that they condemn rather than help people.
Christ could see behind the suffering of men, behind their sins, and He
was not distracted by what they did. He was concerned for men first and
for their behavior last. He knew that if He could reach the man, the
behavior would take care of itself. We are supposed to be like Him, men
and women who, because His Spirit indwells us and because we participate
in His living and dying, are able to see the hearts of other men and
women and to unite them with the power of God's love and forgiveness.

_Participation in the Resurrection_

This kind of living would bring us to our third participation in the
life of Christ, namely, in His resurrection. Because He was faithful to
His love and willing to die in obedience to its demand, He was raised up
in triumph, and with Him all things were made new. These were the events
of His life. But His life affirms the principle of God's life as it is
lived in human existence. Since His Spirit incarnates itself in us, then
we may expect that our lives will be triumphant also and be the source
of renewal for others. Another criticism that we can make of Christians
is that they do not have this sense of expectancy, this sense of
deliverance, this sense of triumph, and this appearance of having been
renewed. All too often we are grim and sad, discouraged and cynical, and
our lives contradict the faith we profess.

However, because we participate in His resurrection, we are given the
wonderful power of facing any problem with courage, even though it may
seem, from a human point of view, that no solution is possible. We live
in the faith that if we consent to be buried with Christ in His death,
we shall be made partakers of His resurrection. And this, not in the
hereafter, but now, in this present life.

A father told me of an incident with his son that illustrates the
principle we are now considering. He and his son had become involved in
a quarrel and both had lost their tempers. The father confessed that he
had said some harsh and cruel things to his boy. Finally, however, he
came to himself, realized what he was doing, and, dying to his pride, he
acknowledged his fault and asked his son's forgiveness. When the
exchange was over, the boy was still rather subdued, but later when he
came through the room where his father was seated, he called out
cheerily, "Hi, Pop." The cheerful greeting of the son was a sign of the
triumphant relationship between father and son, and, in the human
relationship, the father was participating in the resurrection of Jesus
Christ.

In other words, our participation in the life, death, and resurrection
of Christ will give us courage, faith, and hope. This way of life will
not save us from the pain of human living, nor will it save us from
going through dark times of indecision and lack of faith. We shall,
however, be able to live our lives out of the power of the triumphant
life that God lived in human life.

Our worship is yet another way in which we participate in the life,
death, and resurrection of our Lord. In worship we bring our lives to
the judgment of Christ's teaching and life, and these reveal how unequal
we are to live His life, and how greatly we need His Spirit to transform
our lives. By our confession of our sins we participate in His death for
us and for our sins, and the assurance of His forgiveness enables us to
participate in His resurrection so that we may rise to our feet, make a
confident offering of ourselves, and sing our praises of thanksgiving.

The Christian, we conclude, is one in whom the Spirit of Christ is
incarnate. By the power of the Spirit he participates in the life of
Christ, so that the presence of Christ and His Spirit has contemporary
power and meaning in the arena of human relations. The love of God is
for the world, and this world-love of God should be reflected in the
devotion of His people to His work in the world.

[3] 1 John 4:20.
[4] 1 John 4:16.
[5] Matt. 18:20.
[6] Luke 18:11.
[7] See 2 Cor. 5:17.
[8] Luke 10:27.
[9] Rom. 6:4; See also Col. 2:12.
[10] Mark 8:35.

III

HEREIN IS LOVE

"Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and
he who loves is born of God and knows God."--_1 John 4:7_

Thus far, we have identified the Christian life as participation in the
life of Christ, and the Christian fellowship as the relationship of men
who have been reunited to one another by the presence in them of the
Spirit of Christ. We need to make this concept even more specific and,
therefore, now ask the question: "How does one participate in the life
of Christ; how does one find the Spirit; what must one do?" The gospel's
answer is: "You shall love."[11] It has surpassing attraction, but is
also considerably disappointing. Love is appealing, but its practice is
appallingly difficult. While the Christian relationship seems to promise
a difference, it is hard to identify. What makes the difference? or,
What is the Good News?

_The Gift of God in Christ_

Christians believe that the gift of God in Christ confers something that
man needs but has lost. What is it that we do not have that we are
supposed to receive as a result of our new relationship with Christ? Let
us recall that in our earlier discussion we took note of the ambivalent
character of love. We want to be loved and we are afraid to accept love;
we want to love and are afraid to give love for fear it will not be
accepted. We are not free to love, therefore; that which by nature we
cannot have is the freedom to love. We believe that God is love.
Creation is the work of His love, and love is the work of His creation.
But the ambivalences of human nature keep us from being free in the work
of love. The coming of Christ, in the midst of history, changed the
balance of power between love and hate, life and death, and set us free
to love. Love became the energizing, reconciling force in human
existence. B.C. and A.D. marked the transition, not only of time, but
also of the old creation in which our power of love was imprisoned in
our fear to love, and of the new creation in which our power of love was
set free by the love of God in Christ. Now the triumphant power of God's
love is at work in the world and is available to all who seek to do the
work of love anywhere and for anyone. Accordingly, the work of love was
and is the breaking down of walls of separation, and the reuniting of
man and God, man and man, and man with himself, in all which work we
participate.

_What Is Love?_

Do we know what we mean when we think of love in this way? A clear
understanding of love is needed, because it is so gravely misunderstood
in our time. All too commonly, love is regarded as a sentiment, a
feeling, a "liking" for someone. While sentiment and emotion are
certainly a part of love, it is tragic to make them synonymous with
love. Certainly we mean more than that when we say, "God is love," or
when we wrestle with the concept of man showing his love of God through
his love for his neighbor. In these concepts we are thinking of love as
the moving, creating, healing power of life; of love that is "the moving
power of everything toward everything else that is."[12] Love reunites
life with life, person with person, and as such is not easily
discouraged. The most dramatic symbol of love's courage and triumph is,
as we have seen, the cross and the resurrection; it stands for the love
wherewith God has loved us. "In this is love, not that we loved God but
that he loved us...."[13] Having given us His love, we have it for our
response to Him, so that we love Him by loving one another with His love
which we received through His people. Thus, the nurturing of our
response to God's love is the work of the church. Our responsibility is
to love Him. We are to love God by loving one another, and in loving one
another we introduce one another to God. This is the work of the church
and the vocation of the people of God. We are called to love one another
reunitingly with the love wherewith God loved us.

In order for us to participate in the love of God which is at work in
the world, we need to understand ourselves and our own creaturely
problems in relation to love. Too much Christian thought about love and
its work is abstract rather than a reckoning with the complications of
human existence. In order to avoid this danger, let us turn to a
consideration of what is involved in recovering our freedom to love.

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