Let Us Love as God Loves Us

While “love is blind” as the saying goes, hate looks for every fault. If it cannot find any or enough real faults in its object, hate will imagine faults. Hate will imagine slights, insults, innuendos, criticisms, and other forms of wrongdoing. Hate will misinterpret the words and actions of its object.

Hate is a strong feeling of dislike. It can be a short-lived or long-lasting. It will fade and disappear if whoever is feeling the emotion chooses to stop feeding it, stop thinking about the real and imagined faults that they have found in the object of their hate and stop looking for new ones. Hate is not something outside our control. Jesus knew this truth when he told his disciples to love each other as he loved them, a commandment that he meant for us too.

We are apt to respond with hate when we feel trapped, or we do not understand what is going on. What may be happening is not within our experience. It is new or unfamiliar to us. Someone is not reacting like we have come to expect them to react under a particular set of circumstances.

We may choose to hate in order to avoid intimacy. We use it to create distance when closeness becomes threatening.

We may choose to hate when we are filled with a strong and possibly uncontrollable emotion like fear or anger.

We may choose to hate when we decide to devaluate someone whom we previously valued.

We may choose to hate as form of repudiation of what we perceive to be a dependent relationship, one which will interfere with our autonomy.

When we hate, we wish to rid ourselves of whatever in our minds is causing us distress or unhappiness regardless of whether it is the actual cause of our trouble or our feelings of not being happy, our feelings of dissatisfaction or displeasure with a situation. It is what have chosen to blame for our distress or unhappiness. Our distress or unhappiness may in reality be connected to other factors.

We think to ourselves, “If I rid myself of……. (the object of our hate), I’ll be happy.” But our happiness is likely be short-lived. Ridding ourselves of the hate object is a temporary fix. We have not dealt with the underly cause of our distress or unhappiness.

I believe that we can safely conclude that Jesus himself understood these dynamics. The Gospels tells us that he knew what was going on in the minds of his disciples and his critics.

Since hate is a choice, we can choose not to hate. We can rein in our dislike of a fellow human being, our dislike of a brother or sister in Christ. We can replace it with love. We can choose to see them differently. We can choose to see them as someone toward whom the right thing to do is show caring, compassion, forgiveness, friendliness, helpfulness, honesty, gentleness, kindness, mercy, openhandedness, patience, tenderness, and trust. We can see them as someone who is dearly loved and treasured by God. We can act upon our new perceptions of them.

Jesus did not tell us to love our neighbors, to love one another, to love those who treat us badly, and then leave us to rely on our own limited emotional resources to love them. God works invisibly inside us, giving us the desire, the encouragement, the strength, the courage, and what else we may need to love them.

God will help us overcome our fear of the unknown. God will help us overcome our fear of closeness. God will help us to let go of our fear, of our anger. God will help us value again someone whom we once valued. God can help us to recognize that we can be both dependent and independent; vulnerable and strong, God will help us to understand that we can share our innermost thoughts and feelings with someone and remain ourselves. We will not cease being who we are. God will help us deal with the real source of our distress and unhappiness.

God desires only our good. God does not wish us harm. God loves us, loves us beyond measure. His love for us is his gift to us, a gift that he wishes us to share with others—to love them as he loves us. Let us not hesitate to open our hearts and minds to his grace and become love like God himself is love.