WHERE IS THE LOVE?
Where Is the Love? by the Black Eyed Peas was a hit circa 2003. The lyrics of the song highlight a number of important issues about love in a broken world, one particularly keen observation being that, if you have never known truth, you have also never known love. How true!
True love does not exist in the absence of truth. The words I love you only means something when the person who utters them knows exactly what you are like and still cares for you. That is the way God loves us– truly loves us– and wants us to love. This desire is expressed in John 13:34.
A new command I give you, says Jesus: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.
A New Command
Almost all of us have an intense fascination and excitement for most things new: a new day, a new thought, a new phone, a new car, a new home, and so on. Interestingly, the very old thing about our fascination with the new thing is its unbelievably transient shelf life. The charm of the new is fleeting and sooner than later always fades away. But these words from Jesus were said to a war-torn nation and its ravaged people who had been waiting for something new for hundreds of years. It had been 1400 years since God had given them the commandments. It had been 400 years since God had last spoken through one of the prophets. A new word from God, a new messiah, a new leader, a new king a new something, please. To break the monotony of the old, to liberate them from the age-old despair of silence, anything new any day would surely have been most welcome. And here is Jesus with a new command!
The Jews divided the 613 commandments of the Law into 248 positive and 365 negative commands. Just in case you missed it, this should be read as 248 do’s and 365 don’ts. If you had 613 to remember, let alone 613 to practice, would you not have been most enthusiastic to have received a new one after all those centuries? And then Jesus comes through with a new command– Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.
This mandate to love one another, for most, evokes an unpleasant (covert, if not overt) resistance or even a rebellion from deep within. Interestingly, the similar command to “love my neighbour,” though also inconvenient, still has in my mind the potential for manipulation. If things got just a little too difficult with my neighbour, I could always move houses. Yet, this commandment reminds us that Jesus has left us no such room.
“Love one another as I have loved you!” Earlier, it was “love your neighbor as yourself.” With the latter, I still had the potential of loving myself lesser (if I were that mad) to be able to hate my neighbour more. But he seems to be stripping me of even that privilege here. Far more than simply learning to live with the difficult and the unlovable, Jesus asks us to love them as he loves them. In other words, love sacrificially, by all means, with all intensity, and unconditionally!
AS I HAVE LOVED YOU
If Jesus is truly our light, if he directs us, then we need to be guided by His example. If indeed, we have encountered the light of his truth, if ever we have felt like Francis Thompson. . .
I fled Him down the nights and down the days
I fled Him down the arches of the years.
I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind:
And in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
Down titanic glooms of chasmed fears
From those strong feet that followed, that followed after.
For though I knew His love that followed
Yet I was sore adread
Lest having Him I have naught else beside.
And he ends:
Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest me.
If ever we have felt this love– true love– then we can, and must reciprocate it. This is love that saw us in our truest wretched state and still saw it fit to run towards Calvary’s cross to save us! Only this kind of love can heal a broken world. It is only when we love like this that the world would know that we are truly Jesus’ disciples
Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.
Jesus
The song by the Black Eyed Peas is a long, moral complaint against the society in which we live. Yet sadly, it never progresses beyond its complaint and so never finds the answer to the question it asks. Interestingly, the band reunited to sing the song again after many requests for it some years ago. As one Facebook post soberly reflected: Several years later, The Black Eyed Peas and rest of the world are still asking, Where Is The Love?
Brethren, the world is watching . . .
