Love DefinedSample

  For those of you old enough to remember, the 1960’s was the era of the sexual revolution. The Beatles, the fab four, wrote many songs about love, one of the most memorable being, ‘Love is all you Need.’ And of course, love is all you need, it is our greatest need, so in a sense they were absolutely correct.  But what sort of love? Is love more than one thing?

Love is poorly defined in English; it takes context to make sense of it, and even then? Greek, the original language of our New Testament, had at least four definitions, or, clarifications. The Persians (modern Iran) had up to seventy words for love.  The word love demands nuance, and it needs to be situated. 

As for the Greeks, they used different words for love that belonged in different settings. There is family love, friendship love, erotic love, and one extra, that Paul seized upon– ethical love. Already you can see that confusing the categories is dangerous. Applying erotic love to family, our children and siblings, is called abuse and incest. These draw strict censure from the community, and law courts. And for good reasons!

One of the defining features of friendship, family and erotic love is its instinctive nature. They hardly need much thinking about. We use the term natural to describe them, which is all and well until they are used unnaturally or without restraint. It should never surprise us that the most powerful forces in the world are potentially the most dangerous. 

John Lennon and Paul McCartney often saw love through sexualised eyes. In other words, sex defines love – free sex that is. For a generation who escaped the strictures that were traditionally placed around sex, this sounded like true liberation - too good to be true (which it always is). But the dream of free love is costing us a fortune. Free love has turned out to be very expensive: broken relationships, shattered communities, collapsed marriages with devastated and disadvantaged children, poverty, STD’s, increase of sexual violence against women, the objectification of men and women, and, horrifyingly, children, et al. 

But there is another John and Paul team who saw love in a very different way.  

They saw through a different lens – they redefined love around the cross of Jesus. 

This is love defined.