Empty platitudes about love in songs and slogans prevail. “Love is love.” “Love is a many splendored thing.” “Love wins.” “Live, laugh, love.” “Love is blind.” But what is love?
Did — “What is Love? Baby don’t hurt me” — Haddaway have any insight? No. “It needs to be defined by everyone by his own definition”, he says. Howard Jones? “Love is just letting people be what they want to be.” Will someone please answer Foreigner’s plea to Know What Love Is?
Love, essentially, is putting another before one’s self. And inasmuch as it is about putting others first, it is inherently an act of humility, prioritizing another’s needs and desires above one’s own.
Love is …
Quintessentially, love is to give your whole life for another.
By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.
1 John 3:16
Love does …
Love is more about life. How do we love in the everyday. In the most pointed rendering of practical love, the Apostle Paul writes:
4Love is patient, love is kind, it is not envious. Love does not brag, it is not puffed up. 5It is not rude, it is not self-serving, it is not easily angered or resentful. 6It is not glad about injustice, but rejoices in the truth.
1 Corinthians 13:4-6
Agape Love
Humility and love are intimately intertwined in the New Testament and consequently in the Christian tradition, and both virtues are distinctive of Christianity in contrast with the ethics of the ancient Greeks. Both Plato and Aristotle were strongly elitist in their understanding of humanity and the dignity of human beings. The idea that some people are naturally more important as persons than others was an explicit assumption of their ethical thought. So the idea that indiscriminate love, agape, love of neighbor, whether the neighbor be Greek or Jew, male or female, low or high in the social world, strong or weak, righteous or unrighteous, mentally disabled or brilliant, was or would be very strange and even offensive.
Robert C. Roberts, “Dismantling Walls: How Humility and Love Help Us Make It to the Other Side“
Reflection
- Do you have a well-defined understanding of love? Try to put it into words.
- What do you think of the biblical definition of love, putting another before oneself?
- Who do you know that loves well? What characterizes their love of others?