What is Love?

As an 80’s baby, the question “What Is Love?” automatically strikes up a club beat and the voice of Trinidadian-German singer Haddaway in my head…

What is love?

Oh, baby, don't hurt me

Don't hurt me, no more…

Don’t act like you don’t feel it! Christianity has a peculiar answer to Haddaway’s question.  

In my last post, I suggested that compassion is the defining characteristic of God. The Lord is “filled with compassion” רַחוּם (rachûwm). If you poke a hole in the heart of God, compassion will leak out.

I suggested we move our understanding of compassion away from suffering and towards delight. To delight in our other. To delight in God. To delight in God delighting in us. This is the true intent of what we call compassion. The cognitive, affective, behavioral dimensions of compassion are merely the physiological hardware of relationships. Its original design is the capacity for empathy. Empathy being the center of every relationship. It is the fundamental building block of love.

The entire overarching narrative of Scripture is the story of a God who creates, sustains, and recreates in unlimited compassion.

I have also previously suggested that compassion is the most appropriate way to describe the spirituality of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is the embodiment of what the Old Testament refers to as חֶסֶד (ḥeseḏ, see Exodus 34:6), “goodness, kindness, faithfulness… unfailing love.” The New Testament states simply, “God is love,” ἀγάπη (agape, see 1 John 4:8).

What is love? God is love.

But there seems to be many conceptions of love. So, what kind of love is God then? The historic answer of the church has been “holy love.” A peculiar kind of love that doesn’t always corelate with other modern conceptions.

One of the gifts of the Wesleyan theological tradition is to describe holiness in terms of “love of God and neighbor.” What does it mean to be holy? “To love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:34-40).

In fact, 1 John 4:20 indicates that to love neighbor is to love God. One cannot claim to love God while hating the image-of-God-bearing neighbor. Paul provides a potent summary of the entire law, echoing the teaching of Jesus, “love of neighbor fulfills the law” (Romans 13:8-10).

The prophet Zechariah gives us an integrative definition of compassion, “Render true judgments, show love and compassion to one another; do not oppress the widow, the orphan, the alien, or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another.” In this single statement we see the alignment of three essential words that repeat across the First Testament: justice מִשְׁפָּט (mišpāṭ) unfailing love חֶסֶד (ḥeseḏ), and compassion רַחַם (racham).

Compassion is perhaps a synthesis of justice and love. It was understood in the sense of “cherishing a fetus” or a stirring of love in the bowels. It is the way of tender mercy, delighting in and empathizing with our other. It is through compassion that the “I” “Thou” distinction is collapsed. We see ourselves in the other, and the other in us. Compassion must be focused particularly on the most vulnerable among the community. That is “the widow, the orphan, the alien, or the poor.” The community of YHWH is defined by the quality of life among those who are disadvantaged and disinherited.

James offers the grand summary of Christian faith… “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world” (James 1:27). This is one of the clearest articulations of social compassion in the Bible (more on social compassion later).

The Bible is imploring us to live together in this way, as this is the very nature of YHWH. The church is to be an extension of God’s own way, truth, and life. God is true compassion, and God’s people are a truly compassionate people. A holy people.

In the fullness of time, nurtured in the water of the womb of compassion, God steps into the world in a new way. In the flesh and blood being of Jesus. If we want to see what true compassion looks like, Jesus is the embodiment. The Christian story is all about compassion. The compassion of a stepfather who takes responsibility for a child not his own. A teenage mother who nurtures the Christ child in the womb of her compassion against all odds.

Jesus lives this spirituality of compassion from his first breath in a feeding trough till his final on a cross.

Sadly, many schisms across church history resulted from different interpretations on how to answer Haddaway’s question. The seemingly never-ending variety of new splinter groups have a similar recuring theme. The presenting point of contention among the departing groups varied, but the locus of their theological arguments was often around the concept of holiness.

Consider the latest highly public and contentious example of this among The United Methodist Church. Some of the scholars leading the disaffiliation charge did so under the banner of a Wesleyan emphasis on “holy love,” and the perceived loss of this in the UMC. Many of the arguments featured a legalistic rendering of Biblical purity codes that sound eerily like those Jesus himself actively challenged, reframed, and filled-full.

Consider the series of parables about radical reversals in which the kingdom will be transferred to the outsiders, where sinners and sex workers enter before priests and scribes. This turns upside down all forms of religious exceptionalism and superiority. For a group who predicated their power upon their unique identity as “sons of Abraham,” this is a significant threat to their long-standing hierarchy (Matthew 23).

Jesus confronted the religious leaders directly for their deep hypocrisy. Even referring to them as blind guides, whitewashed tombs, dirty dishes, and slithering snakes. At the heart of his critique is this statement: “You tithe, fast, and pray, but you have neglected the weightier matters of the law… compassion, justice, and faith” (Matthew 23:23). Their hypocrisy was traumatizing vulnerable people. They carefully observed a legalistic system and maintained rigid purity codes, but they victimized the flocks under their care. They held people to a standard of “holiness” that they themselves could not uphold. In some parts of the Matthew 23 speech, Jesus slips into God voice, “I sent prophets, you stoned them.”

But amid his prophetic denouncement, we see a profound image of the compassion of God. As you harm them, I, like “a mother hen” long to gather and nurture them. This is a powerful window into the heart of God. God our Mother longs to hold and heal us from the wounds of spiritual abuse (Matthew 23:37).

Jesus’s confrontation with the Pharisees is a warning for the church today. When our religious system is based on legal codes under the guise of “holiness” and exclusion of certain people, we have become the hypocrites Jesus is speaking too.

When the very religion that is supposed to re-ligament, restore, reconcile, and heal becomes harmful and abusive, it’s time for a course correction. The holiness of Jesus was one of love for God and neighbor. It was kenotic, self-emptying, cross-carrying love. It was marked not by the arrogance of certainty but the humility of wonder. Its clearest expression is located firmly in the Biblical rendering of compassion.

The “grand depositum” of Methodism as “sanctification” is a holiness that is located in the compassion of Jesus. A “heart strangely warmed” by God’s love that moves outward toward others. This is a true “religion of the heart.” One that integrates head, heart, and hands. A love in which orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and orthopathy converge. Its center is a true practical divinity, a faith working itself out in love.

A version of holiness devoid of compassion is not the spirituality of Jesus. For me, a community that embodies the compassion of Jesus is the true test of “orthodoxy.”

Compassion is the place where the way of Jesus takes on flesh and blood in his followers.

The most healing thing we can do as believers is create new Christian communities that become little islands of Jesus’s compassion amid a tempest tossed epidemic of loneliness and isolation.

In the following posts I’ll turn to psychosocial research that seeks to guide our understanding of compassion. I’ll make a case that growing in a spirituality of compassion is the most important pursuit of people, churches, and societies in the twenty-first century.