Rev. Michael Curry reflects on the description of God’s expansive love found in the Bible.
Love is a firm commitment to act for the well-being of someone other than yourself. It can be personal or political, individual or communal, intimate or public. Love will not be segregated to the private, personal precincts of life. Love, as I read it in the Bible, is ubiquitous. It affects all aspects of life.…
An oft-quoted passage in the New Testament says, “God so loved the world that he gave his only son” [John 3:16]. The Greek word used by the New Testament writer for the word love is agape. And the Greek word used for world is kosmos, but what it really means is “everything”—“everything that is.” Kosmos is what the spiritual is talking about when it says of God, “He’s got the whole world in his hands.”
God so loved the world that he “gave.” God gave. God did not take. God gave. That’s agape. That’s love. And love such as that is the way to the heart of God, the heart of each other. It is the way to a new world that looks something more like God’s dream for us and all creation.
Curry upholds such love as a path of selfless action:
Love as an action is the only thing that has ever changed the world for the better. Love is Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi…. Love is a little girl in Pakistan named Malala Yousafzai standing up to armed men who said that girls shouldn’t be educated….
Love is a firefighter running into a burning building, risking his or her life for people he or she doesn’t even know. Love is that first responder hurtling toward an emergency, a catastrophe, a disaster. Love is someone protesting anything that hurts or harms the children of God. Jesus said it this way, hours before his crucifixion: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s own life for one’s friends” [John 15:13].
Love is a commitment to seek the good and to work for the good and welfare of others. It doesn’t stop at our front door or our neighborhood, our religion or race, or our state’s or your country’s border. This is one great fellowship of love throughout the whole wide earth, as the hymn goes….
Where selfishness excludes, love makes room and includes. Where selfishness puts down, love lifts up. Where selfishness hurts and harms, love helps and heals. Where selfishness enslaves, love sets free and liberates.
The way of love will show us the right thing to do, every single time. It is moral and spiritual grounding—and a place of rest—amid the chaos that is often part of life. It’s how we stay decent in indecent times. Loving is not always easy, but like with muscles, we get stronger both with repetition and as the burden gets heavier. And it works.
Reference:
Michael Curry with Sara Grace, Love Is the Way: Holding on to Hope in Troubling Times (New York: Avery, 2020), 14–16, 20, 23, 27.
Image credit and inspiration: Aaron Burden, Untitled (detail), 2016, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. When will this water drop? We don’t know what will happen but Love is with us regardless.
Story from Our Community:
The words radical resilience remind me of the profound determination I have had to tap into in order to be still and to move forward. After recently leaving an abusive marriage, I find myself discovering hidden treasures within my healing, strengthening, stretching soul. There have been so many moments when I’ve declared, “I’m done,” but now I feel the grace, love and acceptance that eluded me for so long. Listening to “Turning to The Mystics” the other day, Jim said, “God meets you exactly where you are.” His words brought me to tears…. [There is] a renewed light allowing me to see more clearly the inspired Source within my soul. I see my life now as a rebellious act of radical resilience.
—Nancy P.
