Love and Other Squishy Words

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It’s common among many families today to express their love for one another verbally. They say “Love you” at the end of a telephone conversation and say similar things to each other when they are ending a visit. Many also use the phrase with their close friends.

I think it’s great. When I grew up, youngest in a family of five, we all knew we loved each other and showed it in many ways, but we wouldn’t dare express it verbally. I think that was much the case in most families “back in the day.” It was culturally inappropriate.

I hope today’s usage doesn’t become just another throw-away phrase, one of the many we use so regularly and unthinkingly that we forget or overlook its meaning. This kind of love, the kind we have for family and friends, can be classified as “agape,” borrowed from the ancient Greeks. But more on that later.

Ambiguous Feelings

Like money, age and other topics, I believe most of us have ambiguous feelings about the word “love.” We may “love” the word or hate it, seeing it as squishy, something that religious, “spiritual” or social studies people are always talking about. But there’s no getting around it, an understanding and acceptance of the meaning of love – at least in the Christian and Jewish traditions – is crucial in the search for God.

The Shema, for centuries as now, is at the heart of Jewish faith. “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. Therefore, you shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength.”

Estimated by biblical scholars to be 2,600–2,700 years old, this was a sort of an “in your face” statement by ancient Hebrews, who were surrounded by nations who had a plethora of gods. The Shema proclaims that there is only one and that one should mean everything to the believer. It doesn’t take much imagination to apply it to today’s world. Contemporary believers are also surrounded by people who worship lots of things except God.

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As many of you will recall, a question about the Shema - meaning “Hear” - was put to Jesus in Matthew’s gospel. “To test him,” a lawyer asks, “teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus responds with the Shema, adding what is probably a later version from Leviticus: “And a second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.”

In other words, if you were asked to summarize what is required of faith, these two would fill the bill. In Luke’s gospel, you may recall, Jesus is asked another question by a lawyer whom Jesus praises for quoting the Shema.

The lawyer asks, ‘And who is my neighbor?” Jesus answers by telling the famous story of the Good Samaritan. He ends it by asking the lawyer which of the people who encountered the man left, beaten and robbed, on the side of the road – the priest, the Levite or the Samaritan – “proved to be a neighbor” to the man? The obvious answer: the Samaritan, the one who helped the man who was mugged.

So, the word “love” may seem squishy, but it’s not just a feeling but is at the heart of religious faith and comes with requirements about our relationship with others.

And that brings us back to that word “agape.” According to ChatGPT, classical Greek had several words for different kinds of love, and agape was relatively uncommon compared with philia (friendship) and eros (sexual or passionate love).

Best for the Loved One

When Jewish scriptures were translated into Greek 200-300 years before the birth of Jesus, agape was used to translate Hebrew concepts of love, including love of God and love of neighbor. Regarding the later, it now generally means “love that wants the best for the one loved” without regard for oneself.

There’s no better description of “agape” than in St. Paul’s First Letter to the Christians in Corinth.

“Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. …Love never ends.”