On October 24th, Jeremy Courtney, of Preemptive Love Coalition, told Wheaton students to love others as Christ first loved us.
That sounds pretty familiar?
Yeah, it probably is. I know I’ve heard it time and again in Sunday School, in sermons, in oft-quoted Bible verses. But as Mr. Courtney spoke, the recklessness of that love seemed to take a much more tangible form, and it shook me.
I won’t recount the entirety of his message here (but you should still listen to it here). Here’s the gist of the beginning: Courtney moved to the Middle East just after 9/11, and the first several months were frustrating—meeting people and talking to them and evangelizing and eventually just talking in circles. Courtney described an interaction with a café owner in Turkey, who welcomed him enthusiastically and said, “You’re a Christian, I’m a Muslim—we’re just the same.” Courtney says his immediate response was to be defensive. Instead of accepting this man’s welcome, he proceeded to protest how they were different.
Courtney was struggling. He felt like he was getting nowhere, and he cried out to God, asking why nothing was changing. He says at that moment he felt God’s voice clearly—“Because you don’t love them….You love being right…. I won’t do anything through that arrogance.”
Courtney’s message was simple—to love as Christ loved us, which was more than we deserved and “while we were yet sinners.” And yet, put into such a stark and tangible context, I felt convicted of what that really meant, and how rarely people love like that.
Courtney’s experience is a relatively common one (not necessarily the relocation to the Middle East). People are different—we have different experiences, different cultures, different identities, different religions. And out of fear that our own individual set of beliefs and habits and social norms might disintegrate, we are hypervigilant of differences and boundaries, and we’re careful to define them (again and again).
And this is important. I think there are things to be defended and things to be articulated. But in this world—a patchwork of cultures, traditions, and perspectives—it can be easy to draw too many lines. We start categorizing people into groups; even amongst Christians we’re careful to clarify that, oh yes, Anglicans and Presbyterians are both Protestant, and both “Christian”, but there are significant differences. Some Protestants are even (unfortunately) hesitant to include Catholics under the category of Christian, at least not without a huge amount of explanation and differentiation.
But that has never been the core of our identity as Christians. Off the top of my head, I couldn’t point you to any biblical commands to reject others or isolate oneself from others. I could, however, name several examples of and commands to love selflessly and unconditionally. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, one of those examples is the basis of our faith and salvation.
I know I have messed up. I know that I make mistakes out of ignorance or out of deliberate selfishness. It’s pervasive and relentlessly frustrating. But even before that—before I even existed in the flesh—I was loved and forgiven completely. And that is the love that we are called to emulate and show to others. Not to the others that share our cultural values. Not to the others that share our beliefs about marriage or God or family. Christ loved us completely before we even had beliefs to articulate. And I am positive He didn’t agree with the way we lived our lives before we were redeemed—we aren’t perfect now.
“Love is doing something kind without expecting anything in return.” This is a lesson I remember being taught (repeatedly) throughout my childhood about how to treat others with love. And yet somehow we grow out of that. Or, perhaps more accurately, we grow into justifications for expecting something first, and then bestowing “kindness”. And yet I know—I’ve seen—that we’re capable of so much more. “Preemptive love” is astoundingly powerful; it creates a bond and blurs the lines between giver and receiver, lover and beloved. It’s dangerous and it makes one vulnerable, but it has a deeply healing quality that transcends differences and moves in Christ’s footsteps.
