Love Hurts

THE NEW TESTAMENT LOVE-WORD agape has been so sanitized and compromised that we now have a word for love that we like. Of all the words for love studied so far, agape is the one word for love we shouldn’t like. The other loves are different; we’re supposed to like them.

The beautiful word hesed is the beautiful love: steadfast love. The gentle word racham is the gentle love: compassion. The delicious word philos has a great sandwich named after it: the philly cheese steak. These are all good loves. We can burn out showing all of them. But in their proper place and with the proper balance, these loves are supremely, satisfyingly human. They are also wonderfully divine.

But agape is a pain in the neck. Agape is brutal love.

Why else would the Greeks eschew this word? Was it because they knew what it really meant?

Yes, of course, because they knew chat agape is the love-word for absolute, unself-centered, brutal sacrifice. Its central meaning for the New Testament derives from Jesus’ death on the cross: “For God so loved (agapao) the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16). This is about God sacrificing his Son. Steadfast love, compassion, and delight are all part of God’s love for us, and they are all part of the sacrifice. But the sacrifice is agape. Jesus liked the sinners he spent time with; steadfast love was his only way of thinking; compassion for him was like breathing. But in his act of agape, his tone changed, and so did the tone of his disciples.

Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” He called the crowd with his disciples and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. (Mark 8:31-35)

Peter, who adored Jesus’ steadfast love and compassion, and who could never get over the fact that Jesus liked being with fishermen, tax collectors, and prostitutes, completely rejected Jesus’ decision to act out agape. In his rejoinder to Peter’s rebuke, Jesus called Peter “Satan.” Jesus followed the admonishment with a lesson for all of us: “Deny yourselves, pick up your cross, and follow me.” He never said we had to like it. He didn’t like it when it became his turn to sacrifice. He parried with people he liked; he had compassion for people he healed; he promised never to leave or forsake his disciples. But when it came time for agape, he said: “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want” (Mark 14:36). “At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachchani?” which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'” (Mark 15:34). That’s the correct expression for living out agape: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The apostle Paul’s exhortation to agape is not a whole lot sweeter:

If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. (1 Cor. 13:3-8)

Paul takes away our favorite sins—envy, boasting, arrogance, irritability, resentment. He requires us to make sacrifices for others but not for personal glory. He tells us chat in this mess called “life,” if our love is real, it “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” I’m choking on the “alls.” It gives an awful meaning to the phrase “love never ends” (or “never fails,” as some versions render it). Agape hurts and exhausts.

The New Testament writers adopted agape as the standard word for love. We think this means that agape must also have some softer meanings besides “sacrifice,” “death on a cross,” “giving away our possessions and giving our body to be burned.” But agape didn’t make the Cross, the Cross made agape. The Cross isn’t a subset of agape, agape is a subset of the Cross. The fact that the writers chose agape as the primary, defining word for love in the New Testament, and thus for life in the Christian community, shows how radically the New Testament redefines love from the perspective of the Cross. It also shows how radically the New Testament defines our concepts of friendship. For Jesus tells his disciples: “This is my commandment, that you love (agape) one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends (philos) (John 15:12-13).

Later, as his church foundered on the rocks of dissension, mistrust, and hatred, John told his flock: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:10-11). And I have the audacity, before God and the whole universe, to ask, “I know I have to love (agape) my brother and sister in Christ, but do I have to like them?”

If we have agape for the people we serve, being loyal to them, having compassion for them, and liking them are a cinch. Jesus mustered the latter three loves without difficulty, but when faced with showing agape, he sweated blood.

As pastors we do not die on a cross for our people. The atoning sacrifice of Christ is complete. But there is a definite sense in which we follow in Christ’s footsteps, as Paul did, who tells the Christians at Colossae that, “I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Col. 1:24). Until Christ returns, we live out his agape sacrifice in the church, for the church, and for the lost world Christ came to save.

Redemption is complete, but a whole lot more love must still come to light. This love takes the Cross of Christ as its model, is an extension of it, and thereby brings Christ to the people to whom agape is revealed. For this reason Paul describes his life to the Christians in Corinth as “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you” (2 Cor. 4:10-12).

Agape isn’t so much its own kind of love as it is the other three loves rolled into one major sacrifice to accomplish the task of delivering God’s love. Jesus’ Cross is the ultimate expression of God’s hesed, racham, and philos, but God’s decision to send his Son to die and Jesus’ decision to go the whole way with the sacrifice are agape.

Agape is decision love. Agape is the decision to make sacrifice. It is the decision to make deep personal sacrifice for the sake of the beloved. It is the decision to make sacrifice based on the realization that hesed, racham, and philos are not separate loves but unique facets of one love, the love of God who pours out his life for the world.

Tied down

Sacrificial love fleshes itself out in innumerable ways in pastoral work. But I am drawn to the sacrifice of Ezekiel for the people of Israel as a concrete definition of what it means for pastors to complete the sufferings of Jesus and thus bring him to people. The Lord told Ezekiel:

And you, O mortal … lie on your left side, and place the punishment of the house of Israel upon it; you shall bear their punishment for the number of the days that you lie there. For I assign to you a number of days, three hundred ninety days, equal to the number of the years of their punishment; and so you shall bear the punishment of the house of Israel. When you have completed these, you shall lie down a second time, but on your right side, and bear the punishment of the house of Judah; forty days I assign you, one day for each year. You shall set your face toward the siege of Jerusalem, and with your arm bared you shall prophesy against it. See, I am putting cords on you so that you cannot turn from one side to the other until you have completed the days of your siege. (Ezek. 4:1-8)

God ordered Ezekiel to become a living parable of judgment. Pastors are living parables of love. But Ezekiel’s prophetic tie-down was an act of agape as surely as was Jesus’ and as surely as is ours. Beneath the judgment Ezekiel portrayed, his days roped to the ground were a type of Jesus’ day nailed to the cross. Ezekiel’s tie-down is a type of our years of commitment to the church we serve.

The fact is, many of us feel like Ezekiel. We feel tied by ropes to the church we love. We bond with it, but the bond feels broken; we have had compassion for it, but we feel burned out; we like it, but it has spurned our friendship so many times we strain to rejoice in it. If we choose to love in spite of the pain, that’s agape.

For the pastor, the agape decision is the decision to stay put, to refuse to untie the ropes that tie us to the place God binds us, determined to show hesed, racham, and philos in a personal sacrifice far beyond the normal boundaries of these loves.

At this point, laypeople may cry foul:

“We’re stuck in our work too.”
“We’re tied down to a job that hurts us.”
“That’s just how it goes; tough it out.”
“Now you can relate to what we go through in the world.”

Yes, but: Every other vocation works better with love, but does not strictly require it. Teachers, doctors, plumbers, politicians, and corporate types all do their jobs better if they love the people they work with, but they can do their job well enough without love because they are not paid to love people. In most jobs, integrity is denned by the ability to work for people we do not love. A surgeon who is acting professionally wouldn’t flinch or slip stitching the guts of a person whose guts he or she hates. Any teacher can teach those he or she loves. The best teachers can teach people they thoroughly dislike. It’s tough, but to be a professional demands learning to work with people you dislike.

Pastors cannot do pastoral work for people they hate or even dislike. Love is our life’s work. We must love our church in order to do our job. The process of pastoral work for persons and churches we dislike or even hate is to learn to love those persons and churches.

“Impossible!” you say.

That’s the point. That’s why we must be tied down to the place we serve. And it is why staying tied down is our act of agape. Agape, like ministry itself, is radically free. We can choose to leave, and we can choose not to love. Often the two are the same decision.

The difference between agape and hesed is that hesed is covenant love and agape works above and beyond covenant obligation. What happens when the covenant is broken? The parties are set free. A pastor is free to leave a church that violates the pastoral contract, in letter or in spirit. Agape love is the pastor’s decision to continue the bond beyond the ken of human bonding—when the covenant is broken and the parties are still bleeding. Agape is the decision to stay with the bond, continue living in hesed, long after the right to all hesed has been forfeited. This makes agape a radical form of freedom because it is always undeserved love. We say frequently and correctly that God did not need to send his Son to die for our sins. God sent his Son in freedom. It is likewise true that a pastor does not need to stay in a church and die for its foolishness. The pastor’s choice is made in freedom. We can walk away and do well elsewhere. God will not curse our ministry if we do. But we can choose to stay. To choose to stay is agape.

Minority sacrifice

On the other hand, agape sets us free. Since the act of agape is the decision to make deep personal sacrifice, in that decision we absolutely transcend our circumstances—even as we are deciding to sink ourselves into our circumstances in a costly way. Hesed, racham, and philos are hard-wired into our human nature, and if our parents have raised us well, these loves are nurtured in us by a family and a culture that care about these loves. No individual, family, or culture can survive for long without loyalty, compassion, and friendship.

But agape is the decision to love to the point of giving our life away. Agape love transcends our human circumstances and instincts; it transcends our nature and our nurture. In this respect, to choose to make agape sacrifice is to make a decision utterly outside of human nature and nurture, and so it is utterly free.

A man who had just begun coming to church woke me from a deep sleep, after midnight, with a telephone call from a local truck stop.

“I’m really hurting,” he said. “Can you come see me?”

“Can this wait for the morning?” It was the only rational sentence I could utter.

“No. It can’t.”

“Okay, I’ll come down.”

When I arrived and sat across from him in the booth, his first words were “You don’t look like you want to be here.” He spoke with obvious disappointment and a slight but definite edge of anger.

“I don’t want to be here,” I replied.

“Well, then, uh … uh, why are you here?” he muttered. “What’s the point—”

“Look—I’m here,” I said. “Now what’s on your mind?”

He was in great need, and the conversation was important. But I didn’t need to feel compassion or friendship, and I certainly felt no steadfast love for him. I’d made the little but definite sacrifice to be there (at the time it seemed like a big deal). That’s all that was required. I honestly felt then, and now, that I could have said no to the man and it would have been okay. I didn’t feel a compulsion to go.

This is what the New Testament writers meant when they said that the community of Christ is a community of agape: We are to be a community in which we live and act in freedom—without fear. John tells us, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love” (1 John 4:18).

This is congruent with Paul’s vision; we need no Law because where the Spirit of Christ rules, the reign of the Spirit is the kingdom of love: “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor. 3:17). As we live in free sacrifice for one another, as we give our lives, we receive life back ten, twenty, and a hundredfold. Agape is our toughest choice in life, and it is also our best dream.

But, unfortunately, agape does not rule in the church. It did not in New Testament times (or Paul wouldn’t have suffered as much at the hands of believers as he did at the hands of unbelievers). Though perhaps love has reigned for short periods in church history, no Christian community has come up with a way for Christians to live together in perfect love, and no one will until the Lord returns.

While it’s okay to dream, in reality the church has always relied upon certain people to show agape even when the majority didn’t. To be a pastor is to be one, among others, who chooses to make the sacrifice of love even when others won’t. That means, in brutal terms, giving your life away to a community of people who, for the most part, are not going to give it back.

Agape is dangerous—to us and to those around us. For one thing, our agape choices affect our families. Jesus guarded his decision to sacrifice, carefully choosing when and where to make his sacrifice. He did not readily give himself into the hands of humans.

Obedience-based sacrifice

How do we know when to choose agape in ministry?

Generalities are forbidden. We cannot trust our instincts. We can, for the most part, trust our instincts in hesed, racham, and philos; these we can understand because they are built into most of us and into our culture. But agape is “other” than us. It is a choice to be other than we are; that is, to violate our own nature for the transcendent freedom of the children of God.

As normal human beings who like life—the very thing the Scriptures expect of us—we cannot by nature be good at figuring out what our cross is and when we should pick it up.

We cannot use the concept of sacrifice as our criterion. That is, we cannot decide when and how to sacrifice simply because we perceive a sacrifice is there to be made. As 1 Corinthians notes, we can give all we have to the poor and deliver our bodies to be burned, but without agape, unless it is the right decision to sacrifice at the right time for the right reasons, the sacrifice is useless.

Martyr Jim Elliot could have sacrificed his resources to a soup kitchen on the way to South America and the Auca Indian tribe. Dorothy Day might have responded to a call to foreign missions, but then she never would have begun the Catholic Worker Movement with its gospel soup kitchens.

The criterion for the agape sacrifice is not the concept of sacrifice or even apparent human need. The criterion for agape is obedience to God. The Scripture says that to obey is better than sacrifice.

Since the coordinate of agape is obedience to God, agape frees the pastor from the church’s social and psychological matrix, which can be so desperately stifling and, frankly, unnecessarily costly. Agape obedience may drive a pastor away from a costly, sacrificial ministry to a church that is a joy and a refreshment. For some pastors, this is the hardest sacrifice they can make.

How do we listen for God’s will to sacrifice? We listen to it in freedom. We listen for his will knowing that we can walk away from the sacrifice and be happy serving him elsewhere. This means two things:

First, if we walk away from the sacrifice at a particular church and the future works out well for us, that doesn’t mean that to have stayed at that church and made sacrifice was never really God’s will for us. We can’t have it both ways: if we want freedom, we need to accept responsibility for freedom. In other words, our lives may be happy doing something else, but our lives may not be as meaningful or as fulfilled as they might have been had we freely accepted the call to sacrifice.

Second, God gives us many opportunities to make the agape decision. Walking away once, twice, or even three times from churches that require the agape sacrifice does not preclude more spectacular opportunities to say yes to Christ’s call to deny ourselves, pick up our cross, and follow him.

A word of caution: It is important to listen to God so that we do not waste our lives on sacrifices with no payoff for God (remember the parable of the talents?). Not every religious organization that uses the name “church” should have a pastor. Some (supposedly Christian) religious organizations house demons. They may confess good theology. They may be growing. The people may smile a lot. But they destroy pastors’ lives.

Unfortunately you can’t spot them easily; these organizations don’t go by names like Belial Baptist, Conflagrational Congregational, or Profligate Episcopalian. The line between a church that needs a pastor and will support one—but needs lots of agape to survive—and a gang of thugs who can’t abide pastoral care, kills pastors, and needs nothing but the dust from our feet, may be cracked and faded or virtually nonexistent. But Jesus orders us to walk away from pastor-killing churches. He’s the agape man, but he also tells us: “Do not give what is holy to dogs; and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under foot and turn and maul you” (Matt. 7:6).

Which brings us to the next chapter: the profile of a pastor-killing church.