More Than a Feeling

I am quite sure when Boston sang More Than a Feeling, they had nothing in mind like I am thinking, but I can't get it out of my mind since it dropped there. I have been reading a book by Michael Harper called The Love Affair which is challenging my beliefs about what love really means, or perhaps I should say how love really works. Ever since I first studied Greek in Bible college, I have believed that the love the Bible teaches, that Jesus demonstrates, is something unique. It is represented by the Greek word (αγαπη) transliterated "agape."

I have long taught that agape is a love of the will; that it cannot be anything else because it is commanded. God could not command the emotion usually associated with "love" in our generation, or in any generation for that matter. Harper suggests that the fullest sense of agape must be informed by our understanding of God's eternal, infinite character. He rightly points out that in the Old Testament especially, God is pictured as an emotional being. He longs for His people, pines for his people even. He mourns when they disappoint Him, as they regularly do. He is jealous when they have adulterous relationships with other gods, as they often do. He shows His wrath when dealing with people who deserve it.

That picture is not the sterile, compassion-less agape of will alone. Nor can one dismiss the most well-known verse in the Bible, John 3:16, "For God so loved the world...." The incarnation of that love, Jesus, was Love in person, the very demonstration of what it means to love as God loves, for He was God in the flesh. One cannot read the Gospels without seeing a Man consumed by love. The amazing thing is that He directed his love toward the un-loveliest people one can imagine: lepers, tax collectors, prostitutes, His executioners.

Perhaps it is this last category that most merits investigation. A cardinal principle of Bible interpretation demands that we first look at how the people directly involved would see the action or hear the dicta. The scene at Calvary is interesting, to say the least. The condemned Man had previously shown his compassion for the ones He knew would call for his death, by his wish to bring them to Himself, "as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings." Standing at the foot of the most torturous execution instrument the Romans could devise, the bystander would have heard the alleged Messiah forgive those who carried out his execution. Whereas the Jews who had asked for the sentence willed the blame upon themselves, Jesus absolved the Roman soldiers of blame. This irony would not have been lost on a perceptive observer.

This brings me back to the idea Harper planted that agape includes compassion toward the object loved. It is hard to classify compassion as anything but an emotion. A careful study of the love commanded by God in the New Testament proves it to be directed horizontally much more frequently than vertically, reciprocally. It is true that when asked, Jesus listed the great commandment as “Love God,” but he followed immediately with, “and love your neighbor.” The rest of Scripture seems to imply that Christians must demonstrate their love for God BY loving their neighbor. And if this is done as Jesus did, it is not without compassion.

I have said frequently over the years that we are not commanded to like anybody, but we have to love (agape) everybody. Now I think that biblical love may not be fully mature if it lacks compassion. I struggle to picture this until I imagine what Jesus would be feeling (WWJF). For example, I don’t like the way my neighbor/brother/spouse is behaving; it is decidedly un-Christian… unlovely. So I love (agape) them anyway, but what am I to feel? Compassion – pain that they have strayed from or never gotten close to God’s will. I feel their lost-ness, their need to be right with God. Love is more than a feeling, but it is, rightly expressed, also not without feeling. Not if it is God’s love, shed abroad in our hearts to be shared abroad in an unlovely world.