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Cultural vs. Divine Love

I heard a short sermon once in which the preacher said something to the effect that eternal life was equivalent to knowing God. It brought to mind what John says in his first epistle to the early Christian church: the proof that we know God is that we love, and love of God is best demonstrated in love for others (I John 4:7-12; 19-21). My takeaway from all this was: eternal life = knowing God = loving God = loving others.

 I wrote the preacher after the service to share my thoughts. He agreed with my equation and added an important caveat. Since we are all of us creatures of our culture, he said, we tend to understand love the way our culture presents it, which doesn’t necessarily jibe with the reality of the divine love that Jesus--or, I would add, the Buddha, or Sri Ramakrishna, or Swami Ramdas, or Peace Pilgrim--embodied. Because of these competing and often contradictory concepts of love, it is essential that we maintain a healthy self-criticism and not blithely assume that what we mean by “love” is the same as what these holy figures mean.

 How can we check our culturally influenced notion of love? By soaking in the words and actions of the great lovers. I think there's at least one clue about what love really is in Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan. Something that struck me recently about that story is that, although the lawyer asks Jesus "Who is my neighbor?," Jesus, true to form, doesn't answer directly. He tells the well-known story and then asks, in a brilliant twist, "Who do you think was this man's neighbor" (my emphasis)? It's a totally different question. The lawyer seems to want to know how to categorize people so he knows whom he's supposed to help and whom he can ignore: who is my neighbor? But Jesus flips the question around and says, in effect, that it's more important to ask whether I'm being a good neighbor to whomever I meet.
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