Thursday, December 28, 2023

Quitting Before the Final Whistle

“It’s not over ’til it’s over” — so goes the famous saying in the world of sport. Pity the poor competitor who thought his team had secured victory, began celebrating, and forgot the last-ditch home run, the injury-time goal, the buzzer-beating long shot, or didn’t quite get into the end zone before spiking the ball. Apparent victory suddenly turns to horror and shame.

Who would choose to be that man?

In scripture, we find this observation: “Love hopes all things.” A hundred times, perhaps, I have seen and heard this phrase … from the pulpit, on plaques, on the radio, and of course, in every wedding ceremony since Adam. Never have I thought much about what it means.

“Love hopes all things.” Sounds nice. So what?

Never Give Up

Well, not everybody is as dull as I am. Apparently Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, gave some special thought to this phrase. I’m glad he did; though when I consider how much I’ve missed from it, I feel a little like the guy who lost the championship by not paying enough attention.

Kierkegaard doesn’t regard this as a platitude or throw-away phrase, a scriptural confection of little import. He points out that it really means something. It means that love never gives up. Never.

It never gives up at any time, and it never gives up on any person. That’s a lot to say. So we’d better unpack that carefully.

Four Kinds of Love

Scripture famously speaks of four kinds of love. Three of them, the word of God has very little to say about. One, agapē in the Greek, it puts above the others by a great measure. Unlike eros, phileō and storge, the other three, agapē does not rely even a bit on feelings. Phileō capitalizes on brotherly feelings; storge on empathy and bonds of clan. Eros, of course, needs passion, romance or sexual desire. But agapē alone is love that can be commanded — in disregard of, or even in defiance of human feelings.

You can even love [agapē] an enemy, one who hates and despises you, and whose intentions are dead against you, without prospect of change. You can do this because agapē is a love of action, not merely of feeling. With agapē, the feelings are totally optional — feel the love if you can; but you still must do the loving if you don’t. Agapē is also the enduring part of love: it can never fail, because it literally does not depend one whit on the behavior or attitude of the recipient — only on the obedience of the lover to the command of God.

Paul’s comment about hope occurs in the context of the great paean to agapē love. “Love hopes all things.” Now you can understand why.

The Durability of Hope

But there’s more. Says Kierkegaard, “Love, which is greater than faith and hope, takes upon itself the work of hope or takes hope upon itself as the work of hoping for others.” What he means is that the loving person, the one responding to Paul’s encouragement, the one obeying the Lord’s command, hopes not just throughout the entire course of his own life, but hopes as well for the best outcome for every person, always.

Just think about that.

How is that possible? How can such a lofty goal have any sort of relevance at all to the way we experience ordinary life? Is this like moral perfection — just an ideal for which we strive, but which we, in basic common sense, should already despair of personally achieving?

No, says Kierkegaard. For this remarkable durability of hope is empowered through a fundamental Christian reality to which we have already been given, and to which we are morally bound without excuse.

But what is this reality? It is this: the fact that scripture teaches us in no uncertain terms that earthly life is only “a time of sowing” and eternity “the time of reaping”. What is now is not forever. What is coming is right, just, true and permanent. Life is a training ground; eternity is the real thing. What we see now is not the end of the story. It’s not even the truth about what’s really going on. It’s just today’s test.

The Possibility of the Good

“To hope,” adds Kierkegaard, “is always related the future, to possibility.” And “The possibility of the good is the eternal … through the decision to choose hope, one thereby chooses infinitely more than is apparent.” In other words, love keeps hoping, though it does not yet see that for which it hopes. “Hope is related essentially to the possibility of the good — and thereby to the eternal.” And how long shall it endure? Until it sees the hope fulfilled in eternity, and not a moment less. Says Kierkegaard, God’s plan is that “the whole of a man’s life shall be the time of hope!”

What’s the opposite of that? Kierkegaard points to the difference between Christian hopefulness and worldly wisdom. Worldly wisdom says we should hope for the good only so long as common sense allows; after that, we’re fools to keep hoping, and are likely to get taken for our trouble. “Without the eternal one lives by the help of habit, prudence, conformity, experience, custom, and usage … which men call a realistic view of life.”

What’s wrong with being realistic? The problem is that worldly wisdom rejects what God says — namely, that time is strictly a training ground, and that the whole object of hope must lie in eternity. By calculating like a man, “one rejects God’s plan of existence — that time is purely and simply development, prior complication, and eternity the solution.” And thus, one gives up hope at the point at which prudence kicks in. One does not “hope all things” anymore. Instead, one plunges into despair; for what is despair but the giving up of the hope one once had?

Life and Hope

As Kierkegaard puts it, “Everyone who does not understand that the whole of life shall be a time of hope is in despair … everyone who lives without possibility is in despair; he breaks with the eternal; he arbitrarily closes off possibility and without the assent of eternity makes an end where an end is not.” Worldly wisdom says, “It’s over. It’s lost. It’s gone. Give it up.” But God’s commandment is that we shall live in hope until eternity. The game’s not over yet.

Do you believe that? Then however glum your present circumstances, what business have you to give up hope? Dare you to contradict the word of God and say that eternity simply cannot resolve that of which you have despaired? Lift up your heads, Christians: look again to the horizon. Love hopes all things. It hopes for all the good, and it hopes for all the time of life. Love never fails. Eternity will reveal what life has failed to disclose. The end is not yet. The buzzer has not gone. The game is still on. Play to the death, and take your victory beyond. It assuredly is there. The Lord has promised.

Love hopes all things.

More hope next week.

4 comments :

  1. This raises an interesting question. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Or, in terms of this discussion, can love exist if love is not needed because everything is perfectly ordered? Thus, love requires imperfection, which is needed to motivate the drive towards perfection which is driven by love. Is that why the world is the way it is? Also, is that type of love different from I love this music, or I love to bicycle and I love her cooking? So love is a multifaceted and hierarchical thing very dependent on the context in which it is applied.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Well, love does not require imperfection: "The Father loves the Son" (John 3:35). The Godhead is perfect, and God is love. So that's out.

      But maybe hope requires imperfection. Things have to be less than perfect in order to aspire to something better. And when hope is realized, it is no longer hope (Romans 8:24).

      Delete
    2. Not a fair comparison. The state of the created world is not perfect. It's inhabitants are deficient in most things including love. Hence, since those inhabitants are challenged by Love to acquire and display love to mitigate those imperfections to satisfy Love it indeed seems that imperfection is built-in to provide that challenge and demonstrate growth. In other words, it's by design of this type of reality. Other designs might have been possible.

      Delete
    3. Not a fair comparison. The state of the created world is not perfect. It's inhabitants are deficient in most things including love. Hence, since those inhabitants are challenged by Love to acquire and display love to mitigate those imperfections to satisfy Love it indeed seems that imperfection is built-in to provide that challenge and demonstrate growth. In other words, it's by design of this type of reality. Other designs might have been possible.

      Delete