Strange, Radiant, Radical Love

You can become, I think, immune to a certain sort of love.

When I was in middle school, a budding journalist, I wrote an article for the school paper.  It was an complimentary article about a particular school group led by a particular teacher: Mrs. X.  The day after the school paper was published, Mrs. X cornered me in the hall…in a fury.  Why, she demanded, had I not listed the names of each individual student in the article?

She tore into me with such unmerited ferocity that I cried. 

I told my journalism teacher, who promised to look into the matter; then I went home and told my mom.  My mother immediately grabbed her purse, put me back in the car, and drove to the school to chat with Mrs. X and find out what was behind all of this.

To my astonishment, Mrs. X had retained much of her manner and mood.  She treated my mother—my mother, widely known for being the nicest person on the planet and who had simply opened the conversation with a pleasantry—worse than she treated me.  She cussed at Mom, in the school, which to me as a middle schooler seemed a sort of blasphemy.

Witnessing the ordeal, I cried again.

The principal was already gone for the day.  My mother retreated to the car after the verbal lashing with a tight jaw and narrowed eyes.  I followed her, buckled my seatbelt, and exploded as soon as the door closed.  “She’s awful,” I snapped.  “Miserable mean old nasty lady.  How could she treat you like that?”

My mother said nothing, simply threw the car into reverse and got back on the road.  I soon realized we were driving in the opposite direction of home and brightened at the thought of conciliatory McDonalds.  We had been treated badly, and for no reason. 

But we didn’t go to McDonald’s.  We went to a store instead.

My mom turned off the car and blew out a breath.  “Come on,” she said, “and let’s go shopping for Mrs. X.” 

I did not budge.   I was enraged.  “But she just—”

“I know,” Mom agreed.  “She sure did.  She was flat-out mean.  But…” She picked up her purse.  “What does Jesus say we should do when people treat us badly?”

The right response, the one I knew, didn’t seem right in the moment.  Mom supplied the answer for me.  “We turn the other cheek,” she said, “and we treat them with kindness and we love them.  Maybe she was having a bad day.  Let’s make her a gift basket.”

And so we did, and the next morning my mom availed a teacher-friend to deliver it anonymously on our behalf.  We never knew what happened, but rumors went around the school that Mrs. X was unwell, or somehow sick.  She left the school at the end of the week, and I didn’t see her again for years.  But the next time we did see her—a casual encounter while out and about—she wept, and hugged my mom and I like old friends.

That act of love seemed extraordinary to me in the moment: such a purposeful and intentioned Christlikeness.  And yet, as the years went by, I saw that Christlikeness played out in ways large and small by everyone around me. 

The Christians I knew hugged men living in houses rife with bedbugs.  They delivered feasts to the woman who cursed out the pastor once, when she fell ill.  They welcomed the local drunk to services with a smile; they provided for the needs of people who spit in their face and hurt them over and over and over again.  They prayed in secret for needs the world forgot and for those deemed undeserving.  They kept up prayers and correspondences with unrepentant murderers in prison who lied in every letter.  And they did it anonymously when they could, with no expectation of gratitude or acknowledgement.  Indeed, they abjured notice. 

Christian love is distinct. Borne of God, it is a strange, radiant, shocking sort of love that suffuses everything. 

I love random acts of kindness.  And I love good deeds, and trying to do right. As a Christian I have—along with my faith—an ethic that is given to me by God, and that determines how I behave.  I try to be nice.  I try to treat people fairly.  I try to bear good fruit, or at least to allow the Spirit to create good fruit in me.  But we mustn’t confuse kindnesses and good deeds with the deep radicality of Christian love, though those acts may stem from it.

I have heard it said by my atheist friends, sometimes in frustration, that everyone can love others, that Christians ought stop acting like “loving people” is something only a deity could inspire them to do.  And I suppose, for certain kinds of love, that’s true.  Anyone can fall into romantic love.  Anyone can strike up a friendship, or share warmth and kindness, and feel deep affection and affinity for others.  Anyone of any faith can, to some degree, seek the good of others.

But to do so as a Christian is to do so in deliberate defiance of the impulse to self-preservation, to self-defense.  To love as a Christian demands—or should demand—more than our human heart wants to give.  To love as a Christian demands that our grace be scandalous, our mercy outrageous, our willingness to go the extra mile at our own expense to extend to the darkest, cruelest, and most faithless we know. 

Because this is the love that makes things, moves things, transforms things.

God created from love.  God forgives from love.  God sacrifices Himself in love.  Christian love is a generative love, a deeply creative love, one that does no calculus in the understanding that more will be made—that whatever I give past myself is enough for God to use.  Christian love, in the outpouring of the Spirit, can accomplish wondrous and astonishing things.

If you’re around it often, you can take it for granted.  And if you’re not, you can begin to mistake it for paler shadows like “being good” or “being friendly” or “being kind.”  But whatever circumstance we’re in, we must not lose sight of what our love is or can do, because we must not lose sight of who God is or what God can do.

It will never be anything less than a wonder.