Unless you have been off-line for the last few weeks, the 21st century equivalent of living under a rock, it would be hard to miss the ongoing celebration of love that has swept America. The context of this is, of course, the recent SCOTUS ruling on same-sex marriage. Pithy sayings well worthy of the hashtag have flooded across social media:
Love wins!
Love is love!
Love never fails!
Some readers might take it for granted that the last expression is a quotation from the Apostle Paul’s famous chapter on love in 1 Corinthians 13. The context in which it has been cropping up would indicate that that assumption is a bit misleading. What is being celebrated as “love” and what the Apostle may have had in mind seem to be quite different. But if love is love then how is that possible? That popularity of that little tautology (a tautology is a truism that just says the same thing twice, without giving any new information) is indicative of just how popular the term has become, and just how possible it is to make it the receptacle of any sentiment we so desire.
Who is going to argue against love?
Well, closed minded, hateful bigots, that’s who. And I’d have to agree with that answer, as far as it goes. You would have to be pretty close-minded not to like love, and that certainly would make you hateful. And judgmental. And bigoted. But if you dig a bit deeper into what Paul was saying in 1 Corinthians, and elsewhere, it is pretty clear that he wasn’t happy with spouting moralistic tautologies that would enjoy universal assent. That was just as easy to do in the first century as it is today. People have always been enthusiastic about love and rather skeptical about people who weren’t. Paul had his work cut out for him not because people didn’t like “love” but because they loved their own definitions so much.
What is to be done in such an environment? Well, the path of least resistance is to be accommodating. The gospel could be bent or molded around around the existing structures. It would certainly be more palatable as a result. Why bother with running head on against the prevailing wind? Converts come easy if you just convince them that what is on offer is compatible with the status quo. And isn’t that the goal? More converts? Paul, or Jesus for that matter, didn’t seem to think so. In the face of a culture with a perfectly robust and functional moral, social, political, and religious system the first proclaimers of the gospel said something radically controversial. Real love can only result as a fruit of the Spirit of God, and the Spirit of God is only present where New Creation in Christ had taken place. It wasn’t available in the temple of Venus or, for that matter, human sexuality of any sort. This was nonsense to many, and yet Good News to all.
The temptation now, as ever, is to take the path of least resistance. If everyone agrees that love is love, and love is good, why rock the boat? It is so easy for this kind of love to win because nothing has to change. It is perfectly at home in creation just as it already is. But, of course, none of that is really compatible with the Gospel once and for all delivered to the saints. The task, then, is the same that it ever was: Take the path of resistance. Proclaim the gospel. Be the New Creation. Only in this way can real love really win.
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