You shall love.
To love is a duty.
“It is the mark of Christian love and it’s distinguishing characteristic.” So says Soren Kierkegaard.
Love is sexual attraction.
Love has to make you happy.
Love is an emotional connection.
So says everyone else.
Well? Which is it?
First, notice the direction that each moves in.
Love that has to make you happy or has to have an emotional connection, that love moves from you, through someone else, and back around to yourself. The goal wasn’t someone else. The goal was always you. That type of “love” is inherently selfish.
But if love is a duty, if you have to love, then what is required is self-renunciation. That love moves from you and toward someone else. Period. They are the goal, not you. If nothing comes back to you, so be it. To love as a duty means giving yourself up for the sake of another. Isn’t that exactly what Christ did? Thus, to command love is the mark of Christianity.
He writes this, “Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally secured against every change, eternally made free in blessed independence, eternally and happily secured against despair.”
Beautiful! But how is this so?
If the movement of love is from you, to someone else, and hopefully back to yourself, then you can never be sure it will come back or that it will come back how you want it. Always you are a slave to your own feelings and the feelings of other people. Never do you truly love another, but only hope that they love you!
But if love moves from you and toward another only, then you are free. You love all and are a slave to none.
The command to love allows for the eternal to exist on earth.
For the command never changes: it is not hesitant, worried, despairing, needy.
The command is eternal: love. It exists now and for all time. So, to fulfill the command is to touch the security and freedom of the eternal.
Love is a command.
Thank God.
Tom+