A Meditation on Agape

Agape — gratuitous, selfless, and sacrificial love. Freely given. Never earned. Never owed.

But what does this actually mean? What is love?

They say that love is grace. I say that love is also fire.

They say that love is compassion. I say that love is also a rebuke.

They say that love is truth softly spoke. I say that love is also the truth spoken though it breaks us both.

• Proverbs 27:6 — Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy.
• Song of Songs 8:6 — For love — its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of the LORD.
• Proverbs 24:11 — Does God not command us to rescue those who are being taken away to death; to hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter?

A love that costs nothing saves no one.

They say that love is a feeling. I say that love is the cross.

In love there is a season for all things. A season for grace. A season for fire. A season for compassion. A season for rebuke. A season for truth softly spoke. And a season for the truth spoken though it breaks us both.

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To hate someone is easy. To love — now that is hard.

Love is giving everything, expecting nothing in return from the one you love. Love is sacrifice. It hopes in God — hope is no mercenary thing — but from the beloved it demands nothing back. And there is no greater joy in all of life than to love.

• Hebrews 12:2 — For the joy set before him, he endured the cross.

This is the love that bled. This is the love that bids us to bleed.

So where does this love come from? How do we attain a love so deep that we willingly and joyfully go to the cross for even our enemies?

Grace

It is nothing but God’s grace that our hearts are filled with that kind of love. And God is not stingy with His grace. He has appointed ordinary channels for it — and He delights to pour it out beyond them.

The ordinary means are the ones He established Himself: the sacraments. And above them all, the Eucharist — the one sacrifice of the Lord, offered once on Calvary and made present to us again and again, until slowly, we begin to look like Him. The Church calls it the source and summit of the Christian life: every other grace flows from that altar and leads back to it.

But grace also finds us where we are.

For some, it comes through suffering — the kind that shatters hearts of stone because it is the only way we would listen. For suffering is the crucible in which truth is refined.

For some, it comes through the Word — through hours with an open Bible until the Spirit begins to read them back.

For me, it came through my son.

When my son was born, I truly understood, in a mere instant, what genuine love was. I had never felt it before. The only love I had known was what C.S. Lewis calls the parody — as he writes in The Weight of Glory:

“Our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner — no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.” — C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (1941)

That was all I had ever known. Love with the cost taken out. Love with the weight of the other person removed. Affection that looked like love but could not bleed.

When my son was born, for the first time, I felt the real thing. The costly kind. The kind that would bleed for him without thinking twice.

Little did I know at the time, it would set off a chain reaction that led me to the Lord. Because I could finally understand why. Why our King gave His life. Because I knew — I knew I would do it for my son in an instant, without hesitation.

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And if I, a broken man, would bleed for my child without a thought — how much more has the perfect Father loved His own?

• Romans 8:32 — He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all — how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?

I would have bled for my son. The Father gave His Son to bleed — for me.

So whatever door God has given you — whether Scripture or suffering, whether the bread and the cup, whether the still small voice or the shattering one — or the smallest hand you have ever held — sit with Him there. Ask Him to do the work only He can do. Because the love He is forming in you is not something you can manufacture. It is something He grows through your yes. And wherever that door opens, it leads to the same altar.

True love — the love that bleeds, and not only bleeds but does it with joy — that is what Jesus commands of us. When He sums up the Law and the Prophets in two commands, this is the kind of love He charged us with.

So, beloved — pray for it.

The Jesus Prayer

There is an ancient prayer. Its roots reach back through the Desert Fathers to the Gospel itself — and the Church, East and West, prays it still. It is called the Jesus Prayer:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

And if you come from a liturgical tradition, you know that word — mercy. The Greek is eleison. And it does not mean what modern English makes of it. It does not mean only don’t punish me. In the ancient world, eleison is what subjects cried to their king — for rescue, for provision, for protection, for healing, for every good thing a king does for his people.

When the blind men cried out to Jesus, “Son of David, have mercy on us” — this is the word they used. They were not asking Him not to strike them. They were asking Him to restore them.

So pray it. Pray it slowly. Pray it until it prays itself in you.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God — have mercy on me, a sinner. Kyrie Iesou Christe, Yie tou Theou, eleison me ton hamartolon.

And let the King produce this fruit for His Kingdom.

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Paul wrote these words to a church that did not understand love. I think we have all been that church at one point in our lives — I certainly know I have.

Listen to them now, as Paul himself understood them — and as I have tried, in my small way, to lay them out before you tonight.

This is what love actually is.

Read aloud Read 1 Corinthians 13:1–13 slowly, in full.