Works of Love

What does it mean to love somebody? What should we expect from those that we love? What is Christian love? What distinguishes Christian love from regular worldly love?

These are questions that Kierkegaard answers in Works of Love, a book he wrote near the end of his writing career under his own name. It is a brilliant exposition on what Christian love consists of and what sort of love is required of the believer in Christ. It is almost 400 pages long, and yet every sentence is full of significance for the task of loving others.

One of the main distinction Kierkegaard makes in this book is between worldly love, which he sees as simply self-love disguised as loving others, and Christian love, which is based on the commandment that we shall love, regardless of our own desires.

The distinction the world makes is namely this: if someone wants to be self-loving all by himself, which, however, is rarely seen, the world calles this self-love, but if he, self-loving, wants to hold together in self-love with some other self-loving people, particularly with many other self-loving people, then the world calls this love...what the world honors and loves under the name of love is an alliance in self-love.

No, there is actually a conflict between what God understands and what the world understands by love...the God-relationship is the mark by which the love for people is recognized as genuine. As soon as a love-relationship does not lead me to God, and as soon as I in the love-relationship do not lead the other to God, then the love, even if it were the highest bliss and delight of affection, even if it were the supreme good of the lovers' earthly life, is still not true love...to love another person is to help that person to love God, and to be loved is to be helped.

Any other form of love that is dependent on how someone is toward me or reliant upon what good things they can bring to me, all the while neglecting my task to draw that person closer to God, is not Christian love; it is self love.

This reality of Christian love hits me so hard, mainly because I realize how far I am from it. I think about the people I love, and I realize that no matter how well I love them, there is always a part of me that expects something in return, some sort of reward or benefit for my efforts. It is a concern for myself over everyone else. What would it take for me to love others regardless of how well they loved me in return? It feels almost impossible. Sure, I have surrounded myself with people who are able to love me well, and I am incredibly blessed by it. But could I love someone that never gave me anything in return? It becomes so difficult, because it doesn't fit with the way I understand love, and that's a hard thing to let go of. I have to constantly ask myself whether the love I show others is worldly love that is ultimately only concerned about myself, or Christian love that is only concerned with honoring God's commandment, that I simply shall love and not expect anything in return.

This is not to say that we cannot prefentially choose certain people to spend our time with and benefit from (i.e. friends, family, spouses, significant others, etc). After all, Jesus spent a great deal of time with his disciples, whom he called his friends, and very likely benefitted from their friendship, yet he was still perfectly able to love everybody else in the midst of these relationships. What is important is that in the midst of our different types of relationships, regardless of who we are with or happen to come across, that we make the choice to love each one as our neighbor without expecting anything in return.

Here's another passage from Works of Love, one of my favorites about how love abides:

Yes, praise God, love abides! Then whatever the world may take away from you, though it be the most cherished, then whatever may happen to you in life, however you may come to suffer in your striving for the good that you will, if people turn indifferently away from you or against you as enemies, if everyone disowns you or is ashamed to admit what he owed to you, if even your best friend were to deny you...take comfort, because love abides.

When despondency wants to make everything empty for you, to transform all life into a monotonous and meaningless repetition...[when] you do indeed know that God is, but it seems to you as if he had withdrawn into himself, as if he were far off in heaven, infinitely far away from all this triviality that is scarcely worth living for; when despondency wants to deaden all of life for you, so that you do indeed know, but very faintly, that Christ has existed, but with a troubled clarity know that it was eighteen hundred years ago, as if he, too, were infinitely far away from all this triviality that is scarcely worth living for - oh, then bear in mind that love abides! Meet all the terrors of the future with this comfort: love abides; meet all the anxiety and listlessness of the present with this comfort: love abides.