I wanna know what love is
I want you to show me
And I wanna feel, I want to feel what love is
I want you to show me
And I wanna feel, I want to feel what love is
And I know, I know you can show me
excerpted lyrics: Mick Jones, Foreigner 1984
It has been that kind of week with madmen shooting people for NO reason and other madmen insinuating that more weapons is one solution. A celebrated playwright declares that “love is love is love is love is love” and a Facebook friend of mine declares that there cannot be a God or else we would not have had this tragedy.
All of these seemingly non-related details seem related because we’ve all been made with a yearning for real love, the kind no man or woman is able to give. We are much like another popular song ‘Looking For Love in All the Wrong Places’. We however get confused and accept erotic love as love. Sometimes we give all we have and that phileo* love looks like love. It’s selfless but frequently, there is a string attached – a condition. I’m giving and at least you can acknowledge that I am giving to you.
But there is one love, that treats enemies to an everlasting inheritance. The cost was astoundingly high and its acceptance requires devotion but it is described like this “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. 8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” [Romans 5:6,7 NIV]
Who would you die for? We say we would die for our loved ones, our children, our spouses. Would you die for your enemy? For someone who mocked you, ignored you, spited you, betrayed you? Killed you? For someone who really didn’t know love, who violently abused others without remorse?
It happened. And this love is love.
Some say there is no God because of all the evil in the world. Some say however, that there must be a God in order for there to be love, the most irrational of constructs. No, I do not intend a straight forward ontological argument for this entry. My point is that we desperately seek love, the entire world longs for it, but we are so tarnished by the world that we don’t recognize it.
But it is the Agape love, that is UNCONDITIONAL. PERIOD.
phileo is the root from which was derived the city name Philadelphia. “Brotherly love” used here to denote brotherly philanthropic donation for other among other definitions.