1 PETER 1.22
Having purified your souls by
your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another
earnestly from a pure heart…
This verse can be quite confusing, because it
seems to promote the idea that Christians have some sort of role to play in
their own purification; it’s almost as if St. Peter is saying that Christians
make themselves holy. The process of purification involves both the purging of
the bad and the enhancing of the good, as it is with the purification of
metals; in the religious sense, purification is what happens when the evil is
purged and regeneration takes place. However, the most basic rule of
hermeneutics—context!—demands that we allow, as theologians tell us, to “let
scripture interpret scripture.” The whole of scripture is quite clear:
salvation, regeneration, justification, purification (and any other “-tions”
you can think of) are the work of God. The role that mankind plays (with the
exception of sanctification) is one of responding to what God has already done
in Christ, and the appropriate response is faith and repentance; if that
response is genuine, it will show itself in obedience. The obedience Peter
speaks of isn’t obedience to a set of rules and regulations but obedience to
the proclamation of the gospel truth; this obedience is, specifically,
responding to what God has done in Messiah by putting one’s faith in him and
repenting of all former devotions. This obedience brings about purification; it
isn’t a purification we do for ourselves but a purification God does in us and
for us.
Because
we who have responded to Christ in faith and repentance have been purified, we
are now to love one another deeply from the heart. The Christian mode-of-living
in community is to be undergirded and founded upon love for one another. The
love which Peter speaks of isn’t a love of the emotions. It doesn’t mean having
warm and fuzzy feelings towards our brothers and sisters in Christ. This is
desirable, of course, but it isn’t always the case. Just as it is with
biological families, so it is in our spiritual family: sometimes there are
siblings we just don’t like or can’t even stand. Some personalities don’t
connect in friendship. This doesn’t exempt the Christian from loving such
siblings. If love were to be reduced to some sort of emotional euphoria, then
all of us would fail most of the time. The biblical type of love leaps over
that emotional barricade and becomes a matter of the heart, that is to say a matter of the will. The love we are to have for one another is a love that is
rooted in action: it’s putting others’ interests before ourselves, sacrificing
our time, energy, and money for other Christians; it’s thinking firstly of our
spiritual family and lastly of ourselves. This is the kind of love that fosters
genuine community, the kind of love which Christ displayed so vibrantly on the
cross, and it is precisely this type
of love which St. Peter commands the purified to have towards one another.
Understanding
this can become quite difficult since we live in a culture where “love” is
often seen as a loftier word for “sex” (after all, isn’t sex just “making
love”?). The media doesn’t help this perception: from the radio to the
television, from musical artists to movies, the primary message is easy to
decipher: “Pleasure is at the root of love.” Yet this cultural understanding is
far removed from the love that Christians are called to have for one another.
Our culture’s identification of love strips love (especially romantic love) from
the fabric of commitment. Cultural love revolves around the self so that “true
love” is all about the fulfillment and comfort of the individual. Cultural love
tells us that love is mostly just a feeling we “fall into” against our control
and even, at times, against our greatest efforts; and at the center of all this
is always me. This perception of love
is a twisted and corrupt parody of the kind of love that God demands we have
for one another, and this cultural love is rooted in selfishness and
self-gratification rather than love’s true hallmarks: selflessness and
sacrifice.
Our
culture shows us sex and says, “This is love.”
God
shows us a cross and says, “This is
love.”
Jesus,
in his life, actions, and teachings, shows us what true love looks like. His
teachings show us what love looks like when lived out from the heart of genuine
human living, and his teachings likewise tell us about God’s original design
for love. Love isn’t about fulfilling the desires of the Self; rather, true
love is for the glory of God and for the glory of others. It is selfless,
giving without necessarily receiving, sacrificing without necessarily being
sacrificed for, and it dies to its needs and looks out for the good of others
more than it looks out for its own self. Christ shows us that love is more than
a feeling; after all, the New Testament is quite clear that Jesus didn’t “feel”
like going through all the suffering and agony starting in Gethsemane and
culminating with the cross. Love is a choice, despite what culture might say,
and it isn’t something we just “fall into.” Genuine love is shown when we
choose to obey God and to serve others, especially fellow Christians.
The
Apostle Paul wrote a beautiful description of love in 1 Corinthians 13. In
ancient times, Corinth held the title of being one of the most immoral cities.
At one time, as legend states, the Greek goddess Aphrodite had 1000 prostitutes
in her temple. Even if that legend is false, Corinth isn’t exempt from its
blatant mockeries of love: a 1st Century slang word for prostitute,
slut, or whore was “a Corinthian girl.” It’s no surprise, then, that Paul’s
most ornate portrait of love is given to a people who were culturally
indoctrinated with lust replacing love. Corinth, Las Vegas, our own hometowns…
Culture continues leading us astray, and it will do us well to be reoriented
towards a better understanding of love. Remember: undergirding all of Paul’s
descriptions of love is selflessness, sacrifice, humility, and kindness. When
we look at Christ’s life and character, we catch a glimpse of what genuine
human living looks like, and it’s undergirded by this kind of love, a 1
Corinthians 13 sort of love. Here is Eugene Peterson’s beautiful paraphrase of
1 Corinthians 13.4-7:
Love
never gives up.
Love
cares more for others than for self.
Love
doesn’t strut,
doesn’t
have a swelled head,
doesn’t
force itself on others;
isn’t
always “me first”,
doesn’t
fly off the handle,
doesn’t
keep score of the sins of others,
doesn’t
revel when others grovel,
takes
pleasure in the flowering of truth,
puts
up with anything,
trusts
God always,
always
looks for the best,
never
looks back,
but
keeps going to the end.
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