What does unconditional love really mean?
May 9, 2021—Easter 6B
Acts 10:44-48 Psalm 98 1 John 5:1-6 John 15:9-17
The title track off of Donna Summer’s 1983 album She Works Hard For The Money was a huge hit. It topped the Billboard R&B chart for three weeks and reached #3 on the Billboard Hot 100. It remains one of Summer’s most well-known tracks, played around the world and streamed tens of millions of times.
The second single off that same album was a commercial disappointment, only reaching #43 on Billboard’s pop list. I am sure Summers and Mercury Records were upset by the lukewarm reception of this track. However, the late Donna Summers would be happy to know that the youth of our diocese love this song, which is entitled, “Unconditional Love.” If you were in church last week, you heard it:
Don't take too long to find/True love transcends all time/That non-reacting, everlasting love
Give me, your unconditional love./The kind of love I deserve/The kind I want to return.
Until Youth Sunday, seven days ago, when Charles Youngson, on his way out the door for his sabbatical, said something about this song, I had no idea of the genesis of this classic camp hit. When Charles revealed the original singer of this song, and I was so confused. “’Unconditional Love’ was sung by Donna Summers? Like, ‘Bad Girls’ Donna Summers? ‘Last Dance’ Donna Summers?” After googling and going on Spotify to make sure Charles had not prematurely left on his sabbatical with that statement, I explored a little more.
Discovering that this song had a less than stellar reception amongst critics and radio listeners alike actually did not surprise me. We prefer to put our energies into working hard (for the money) instead of receiving and giving unconditional love. This is true not just about Donna Summers’ songs, it is true throughout life. Of course, we in the Church love love.
We love talking about love. We love putting love in our mission statements—"revealing God’s transforming love in the world”—but what do we really mean by unconditional love, transforming love, or in the Greek agape? Jesus in today’s Gospel lesson gives us some clues as to the immensity and the difficulty of participating in God’s love.
“As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love,” Jesus told this to his disciples on the night before he died. Sometimes we believe that God loves us because God is Our Heavenly Father (or Mother or Parent depending on your piety). However, that is getting things backwards. As a fellow priest and friend once preached, “God doesn’t love us because God is our heavenly parent. [God] loves us because that’s who God is, and it is the love that God has for us that makes us God’s children—not the other way around.”[1]
Think about it this way, most of us probably believe deeply that we love our grandparents and parents, our children and grandchildren no matter what. We may even strive to practice unconditional love with them, so that when they hurt us profoundly, we still come back with the same unabashed affection. This is wonderful, but it is actually another form of love, sometimes referred to as storgē, which is the Greek word for familial love. Jesus was calling his disciples (and us) to abide in this other form of love, agape. This sounds great, but what does this love look like?
Agape is revealed in keeping Jesus’ commandment. What was Jesus’ commandment? To love one another as he loves us. [puzzled look] Okay, I know. This is as though we are walking through an M.C. Escher painting in which we reach the top of the stairs only to realize we are back at the bottom. Jesus’ words are a bit circuital. He essentially says: “Love one another as I have loved you. Do this by abiding in my love. You will know that you are dwelling in my love if you follow my commandments. What are my commandments? Oh wait, there’s just one and it is to love one another.” Oh, Jesus!
This snake eating its tail sort of logic is frustrating; however, digging deeper into what Jesus meant by this love may leave us even more frustrated, or at least more challenged! After Jesus told his disciples that his commandment was to love one another he gave them a real-world example of this: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” We sometimes bypass these words too quickly, so let me read them again, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Jesus not twenty-four hours later lived these words out—or perhaps better said, he laid his life down to prove these words perfectly true.
How do we even attempt to live into this sort of love? That same priest I mentioned earlier also pointed out that there are two surprises within these challenging words.[2] The first is right in front of us: Laying down one’s life for another is not simply an act of ending one’s mortal life.
Another sort of “martyrdom” exists. We celebrate this example in the Church Calendar when we put up white liturgical hangings for Saints’ feast days. These Saints did not die because of their faith, instead they lived for it. In the musical Hamilton the character of George Washington put it more simply, “Dying is easy, living is harder.” John in a passage from his First Letter that we read a few weeks ago expanded this concept even further. When we sacrifice resources, we would otherwise use and give to God’s work in this world here too we are laying down our lives. So, this is the first surprise—the agape love of giving up ourselves is not just about death, it happens any time we sacrifice for God’s work in this world.
The second surprise is undetectable in our English translation. The sentence “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” is much more interesting in the original language. The word for friends is philos and there is a specific type of friendly or brotherly love in the Greek, it’s philia (see: Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love). So, is that what Jesus said? NOPE! Jesus used another word for love, and it is—you guessed it—agape!
Why is this important? It would have put those listening to this Gospel on notice. To truly follow Jesus’ commandment, to abide in him, to be his friend is not about brotherly love—love that is complementary or a mirror response to how someone else treats us. Instead, it is about agape—that non-reacting, everlasting love. Alright, again this all sounds nice, but what’s this look like, laying down our life for someone else?
In the middle of last week at the Men’s Bible Study (on Wednesday mornings at 7:00 AM both in person and on Zoom… contact me if you are interested!), and someone asked a wonderful question along these same lines. We were talking about love in action, where the rubber meets the road, and wondered, “How do we live in love when we have conflict with someone else?” I have been pondering this question off and on since I heard it.
Agape is a gift of God—we never have to work hard for it—but when we do not have it, how do we cultivate it? Do we become doormats or pushovers for others? Do we give of ourselves completely such that we become empty vessels—dry and parched? Do we follow the example of Saints who lived for Christ by giving away everything and surviving on the charity of others? Maybe. However, Jesus’ example paints a different picture of agape.
Jesus was not a doormat. He was not a pushover. He pushed over tables in the Temple. He told people no. He even said to his own family, you are not my family—those who do my Father’s will are my brothers and sisters and mother. He stopped healing people in one town, so that he could share his message elsewhere. He paused for prayer. He loved his enemies, but by challenging them. And in these and many other ways, he showed us an example of being “boundaried” in our approach to dwelling in God’s love and sharing it with others. The fully divine and fully human Jesus had good boundaries—he set limits even as he expressed God’s limitless love.
So, maybe living in agape is not so much about being pushovers, running ourselves ragged, and giving everything away, but instead it is about finding times and places to fill our cup with God’s love, like Jesus did in prayer. So that then, that love overflows from us to others, like Jesus did in truly seeing and healing others. And yes, God calls us to give sacrificially of ourselves, but in ways that enrich our lives and others—not just for the sake of suffering. Jesus did not just die to die, he died so that we may live in love.
Remember you are a beloved creature of this love, and not a robot that can work without rest and restoration. God’s love is not an invitation for others to take advantage of us or hurt themselves. God’s love is not a mythical “perfect love” that does not exist in real life. Agape does exist in reality.
God is always more ready to give us this gift than we are to receive it. Some moments we will dwell in this love and it will emanate from us to others. Other times we will be broken vessels that leak the little bit of agape we feel like we have inside. In all these moments may we not shame ourselves or tear each other down for that only prevents us from seeing God’s way of love.
In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ, we see this way: the transfiguration of human weakness by God’s strength, non-reacting, everlasting love as a response to violence, the trappings of death gone and the tomb empty.
In this way, may we sing with Donna Summers and the youth of our diocese:
Give me, your unconditional love./The kind of love I deserve/The kind I want to return.
And when it feels hard to return that love to those with whom we disagree or have conflict, may we rely upon God to sustain us, as we set good boundaries, trusting that in the end God’s resurrecting love always wins! Amen.
[1] Evan D. Garner, “To Love As We Are Loved,” [http://evandgarner.blogspot.com/2018/05/to-love-as-we-are-loved.html, posted: May 6, 2018, accessed: May 5, 2021].
[2] Garner, “To Love As We Are Loved,” [http://evandgarner.blogspot.com/2018/05/to-love-as-we-are-loved.html, posted: May 6, 2018, accessed: May 5, 2021].
