Title: What is Love?
Contents
Like us today, the John community also had many problems to solve on its own. Although there are still theologically divided opinions, it is natural that clashes arose in early Christianity, where Christian doctrines did not yet have a solid system. For them, the central controversy is about the divinity and humanity of Jesus. If Jesus is the Son of God and is a perfect God, then humanity must be abandoned, and emphasizing humanity could weaken the divinity. This issue was settled under the proposition that "Jesus is a perfect God and a perfect man" at the Council of Nicaea-Constantinople in the 4th century, and in the process, those who emphasized only the humanity of Jesus as opposed to those who emphasized only his humanity were eventually pushed out as heretics. However, at the time the New Testament was written, including the Epistle to John, they were very powerful. How can we prove that Jesus is both God and man?
A direct answer to this question cannot be found in today's text. However, in today's text, John indirectly proves the divinity and humanity of Jesus by explaining the fact that God was revealed to the human Jesus. Its medium is 'love'. Through John's definition of love, we can approach the controversy of early Christianity centered on the divinity and humanity of Jesus. What does he call love?
God is love
In verse 8, John says, “God is love.” The same thing is repeated in verse 16. These words are very beautiful, but on the one hand they can be too abstract, and on the other hand they can endanger the Christian faith. The reason this proposition is abstract means that we don't understand the word 'love' correctly. What is love? Is it just love, what you like, what you want to see, and what you want to do? The concept of love also varies widely, so the phrase “God is love” can also be understood in many different ways, so it can be abstract.
The reason this proposition can jeopardize the Christian faith is that it can reduce God into human relationships. In today's text, the words "Let's love one another" (verse 7), and the later part, the words to love brothers, you can think that this kind of love between people is God itself. Here we have to think a little bit carefully. It is correct to say that God is manifested in love between men, but not vice versa. For brotherly love is one of many revelations of God, not the only one.
Not a few Christians accept 'love' as a normative ethic. He tells us to love no matter how hard it is or how unfair we feel. Jesus tells us to love even our enemies.
They argue that we should go two miles with someone who asks to go duck, and we must live up to the word of giving underwear to someone who asks for a coat. In the face of this demand, we respond in several ways.
The first is to regard these words as mere parables and ignore them.
The second is to live with the burden of always feeling that we cannot put these words into practice.
Third, practicing love little by little, mistakenly pretending to be faithful to these words
is to do
The fourth is to actually deny and sacrifice all of one's life, and to fulfill these words self-righteously.
will be
In these four reactions, we have no choice. In fact, it is realistically impossible to give up everything like Mother Teresa and live for the unfortunate. With this attitude, you cannot run a business or engage in art. That being said, self-defense or constant remorse while providing adequate alms is undesirable, given that the Christian faith is fundamentally oriented toward freedom and liberation. Many of these attitudes are like the ideology of loyalty and filial piety, which is a distortion of life that occurs when 'love' is regarded as the norm. So what does this mean?
love is life
John says in verse 9: "God sent his only Son into this world, so that we might have life through him. In this way God's love was made evident among us." According to this verse, it is love that gives life. People often act according to their desires and think that it is love. It's the kind of longing a little girl feels when she falls in love for the first time. The stronger those desires and aspirations, the more likely they are to destroy rather than enrich human life.
We must beware that love is treated on a sentimental level in our faith and in our lives. I don't know if it's because 'han', which is a characteristic of our nationality, contains this kind of 'sentimentalism', but we are approaching almost all issues from political and social issues to our religious life only from a sentimental level. If you look at this trend positively, you can see it as 'new wind' or 'excitement', but if you look at it from a negative point of view, it can be called 'pottery'. It cannot be said that it is unconditionally good for people to always act calmly based on rationality and reason, but no matter how much emotion and romance are necessary, even such factors must be pursued on the basis of reason and rationality in the end to make life healthy.
The New Testament, including John, does not deal with the Christian faith in the category of zealots centered on emotion, but only partially deals with it, and presents it fundamentally very logically. That is, life is given through Jesus Christ. It is here that lies the heart of all the doctrines of Christianity. We are given life through Jesus Christ. So that is the love of God.
What does it mean to say that life was given through Jesus Christ? Life means to live, to be alive. The opposite is death. In the face of death, no noble human deed is meaningless. Even if you give all the riches of this world to someone who dies tomorrow, it will never be love.
Because the riches cannot save him. If we share our pain on this earth and actually help each other, we have to live, but those things never save us from our fate. We, like the early Christian community, believe that only Jesus Christ raises us from death. Through the resurrection of Jesus, we believe that those who believe in him will never die, and even if they die, they will have eternal life again. Life through him is true love. It is not the sweet but abstract love of humans, but concrete and sure love.
Love is the power of God
If life through Jesus Christ is the reality of love, then love is not an act of man, but only an act of God and His power. Because Jesus is the only Son of God and the one to be sent by God, the life and love that came to us through that event is the power of God. Look at verse 10. “The love I am talking about is not our love for God, but God’s love for us.” After all, the love that John speaks of is not the possession or power of man, but the power of God, and that is the ontology of God.
That is why we cannot love even if we want to force ourselves to love. Just as we can't deal with God the way we want, love is also God's power, so it's not something we can handle. The kind of moral insecurity seen in Christians, and the hypocrisy of rationalizing oneself to relieve that anxiety, is caused by mistaking love as one's own ability. It is a kind of schizophrenic phenomenon that comes from taking the proposition to love as a responsibility to bear the proposition to love even though you do not have the ability to love.
path of love
Does that mean it's okay to settle for our incompetence? John doesn't say that. "Beloved, keep in mind that God has loved us so much that we should love one another" (verse 11). These verses themselves sound like a command to love us. First off, that's right. We, who have gained life through Jesus Christ, practice love as the fruit of that life. But there is a subtle tension between these two, life and love. Those who receive life through Jesus Christ naturally share that life according to the principle of life, but love, the fruit of that life, can be manifested in many ways.
It is like the love of parents who love their children in many ways. Just as it is not love to unconditionally embrace an immature son, it can appear in a completely different form in our concrete human relationships. Therefore, we can practice love only when we are equipped with this specific insight into life.
Just as the Old Testament prophets sometimes took the rod to the people of Israel, and as Moses and Joshua treated their people sternly, love is not just a sweet feeling, but a concrete spread of life. The essence of Christian love can be confirmed by the degree to which we deeply participate in the world of life through Jesus Christ. Those who have experienced life through Jesus Christ feel the fullness of life without knowing it, and they want to share the fullness of life with others. That is spirituality and love. Just as the sound that goes out through the flute becomes beautiful music, when the life of God goes out through us, the song of love will resound. We are flutes, not sounds, so no matter how beautiful music sounds, it's not mine. We don't make sound, we just prepare sound to pass through us, and sound makes music. Just as a good flute resonates well, if our spirituality is well prepared, a beautiful sound will resound naturally. That music is the love that appears in our lives.
Finally, John says: “No one has seen God yet. But if we love one another, God is in us, and God’s love is already perfected in us” (verse 12). No one can see God directly, but those who feel the fullness of life spreading through their lives have met God. Are we really experiencing that? Do we Christians feel God's love in these violent times? 2004. 6.27.