That brings up an interesting point, Dale. So if we had asked Jesus to continue that story of the Good Samaritan, and speak of how the rescuer and the rescued might have continued (or not) to relate to each other weeks or years later, after the whole tragedy is but a memory; let’s say the Jewish fellow remains at odds with his Samaritan neighbors - except perhaps his “one friend” that had rescued him. How do you see that relationship developing?
If some crisis in his life and consequent aid from Jesus dissolved his resolute opposition to Jesus and spiritual matters, that’s one thing, but we know how it turned out when those whose hearts weren’t similarly softened and remained adamantly and explicitly opposed, don’t we.
Do we know, though? Might it be to foreclose prematurely on the Good Shepherd who is still out searching for a lost sheep?
The searches don’t conclude and cease just because we may deem ourselves to now be safely delivered into the fold.
Isn’t it possible that many in our society have yet to meet Christ in any recognizeable form?
Absolutely. It is also definite that some have and rejected him. Resolutely.
(47) No One Loves Because He Sees Why
Where a man does not love, the not-loving must seem rational. For no one loves because he sees why, but because he loves. No human reason can he given for the highest necessity of divinely created existence. For reasons are always from above downwards
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As found in MacDonald’s unspoken sermon “Love Thy Neighbor ”
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… and @jpm , as may touch upon a post you made several days ago, I’ll also paste below the extended paragraphs that include the above snippet from Lewis. I think it all maybe begins to address some of what you brought up?
But while it is true that only when a man loves God with all his heart, will he love his neighbour as himself, yet there are mingled processes in the attainment of this final result. Let us try to aid such operation of truth by looking farther. Let us suppose that the man who believes our Lord both meant what he said, and knew the truth of the matter, proceeds to endeavour obedience in this of loving his neighbour as himself. He begins to think about his neighbours generally, and he tries to feel love towards them. He finds at once that they begin to classify themselves. With some he feels no difficulty, for he loves them already, not indeed because they are , but because they have, by friendly qualities, by showing themselves lovable, that is loving, already, moved his feelings as the wind moves the waters, that is without any self-generated action on his part. And he feels that this is nothing much to the point; though, of course, he would be farther from the desired end if he had none such to love, and farther still if he loved none such. He recalls the words of our Lord, “If ye love them which love you, what reward have ye?” and his mind fixes upon–let us say–one of a second class, and he tries to love him. The man is no enemy–we have not come to that class of neighbours yet–but he is dull, uninteresting–in a negative way, he thinks, unlovable. What is he to do with him? With all his effort, he finds the goal as far off as ever.
Naturally, in his failure, the question arises, “Is it my duty to love him who is unlovable?”
Certainly not, if he is unlovable. But that is a begging of the question.
Thereupon the man falls back on the primary foundation of things, and asks–
“How, then, is the man to be loved by me? Why should I love my neighbour as myself?”
We must not answer “Because the Lord says so.” It is because the Lord says so that the man is inquiring after some help to obey. No man can love his neighbour merely because the Lord says so. The Lord says so because it is right and necessary and natural, and the man wants to feel it thus right and necessary and natural. Although the Lord would be pleased with any man for doing a thing because he said it, he would show his pleasure by making the man more and more dissatisfied until he knew why the Lord had said it. He would make him see that he could not in the deepest sense–in the way the Lord loves–obey any command until he saw the reasonableness of it. Observe I do not say the man ought to put off obeying the command until he see its reasonableness: that is another thing quite, and does not lie in the scope of my present supposition. It is a beautiful thing to obey the rightful source of a command: it is a more beautiful thing to worship the radiant source of our light, and it is for the sake of obedient vision that our Lord commands us. For then our heart meets his: we see God.
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I’m sorry-there are some I’ve not commented on till now. Thank you for these posts!
Is MacDonald being hyperbolic in saying that Jesus never spoke hyperbolically ?
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I’ve been thinking on the reasons for love. We’re interesting creatures–we need a rule, it seems, to love unselfishly. We commit to love in marriage–I remember a friend admitting that they loved their spouse because they promised. As a parent, I realize more that I love my children because it is right, and that they won’t fulfil my desires as a child (nor I theirs as a parent). A speaker I once listened to talked about the various levels of happiness–first level was food; second, for the sake of a neighbor; and so on, till we learned more to do something like delighting in what God delights in. Lewis talked in “Surprised by Joy” of how the more he sought for joy in selfish pleasures, the more he lost it–the “Northernness” was an example. It was, I think, by refocusing on God that he found it more. My children and I are happier when we don’t expect fulfillment, and do only the duty we were asked to do. When we realize life is tough, it’s when we find gratefulness for what we have. It’s among the poorest people we often find the happiest.
Here’s a quote from MacDonald that has come back to me on and off, over the years
A man must learn to love his children, not because they are his, but because they are children, else his love will be scarcely a better thing at last than the party-spirit of the faithful politician.
Thank you for these meditations. I’m still struggling through them, and wanting to make sure I understand his thoughts.
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I wondered about that too! Because if speaking of people having logs in their eyes or speaking of the unforgiving servant as owing their master what (I seem to remember somebody having calculated) would have been the equivalent of millions of today’s dollars (or was it even billions!) - if none of that counts as using hyperbole, than I’m not sure what could!
There is also the camel needing to go through the eye of a needle …I’ve heard people come up with all sorts of ‘explanations’ of this (like …there was this gate at Jerusalem called ‘the needle’) - or rather farfetched stuff, which I think is no more than a silly attempt to ‘rescue’ some expression from needing to be considered as hyperbole [or even worse: an attempt to de-fang and domesticate what Jesus intended to be a dangerously important warning for us]; but on the whole, extreme sayings seem to be Jesus’ motif; so my thought is, he meant it to sound as extreme as it sounds, and we’d better just attend to the reason why! --that’s what I think would characterize MacDonald’s attitude here.
Whenever the Lord uses extreme language, it much mean because the thing he wishes us to begin to see must itself be … extreme … probably in the extremest sense possible! So while it is silly to literally think of a log in someone’s eye, it isn’t at all silly to think that perhaps our own sin really is that extreme as we nitpick at a brother’s sin. So … maybe hyperbole in one sense, but perhaps not at all hyperbole in terms of Jesus’ intended point of focus. I mean … we really do owe God ridiculously more than could ever be paid in money, right - so if anything, one could even claim the ‘millions of dollars’ is really an understatement.
It seems to me that I’ve read something from MacDonald in other contexts about hyperbole, but I can’t recall where those were or what he said.
I suspect he would say the Lord was hyperbolic whenever he needed to be in order to help people understand what they need to see. Here might be an interesting contrast to think about: Perhaps where the parables were meant to at least partially hide or obscure, hyperbole (if it is indeed that) is meant to make something over-the-top-blindingly-obvious. A kind of ‘shouting’ as it were: “Hey - if you folks get nothing else from what I’m saying, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE at least just understand this!”
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Yes! This.
One of the [many] pitfalls of our device-connected world that so many of us are immersed in is that we become enculturated to a mental diet of the most scintillatingly captivating entertainment; we expect nothing less than stellar mental stimulation and education from material that, after all, has risen to the top of favorite public attention amongst the avalanche of competition. Any meme we see is immediately catchy and witty - anything less or that has any flaw to speak of, immediately is classified as ‘drivel’.
I’m glad that my own marriage and formidable ‘kid-raising’ years happened prior to much of these present obsessions of ours … because … pity the newly marrieds today who must inevitably discover they are married to … a real person. And any kids they have will end up being … real kids. Meaning, you’re going to have to learn how to (at the very least - occassionally!) be bored with each other, how to accept that most of the words uttered in your household will not be the scripted, witty brilliance that we’ve mistaken for our entertainment birthright.
What I hear MacDonald offering as a ‘beyond this’ kind of thought, though; is that love is not (and never in its true form was) a kind of drudgery. The ‘duty’ of it may be the only skeleton there during long seasons - yes. But if it is to be love as God intends and created, it will not remain that way, and we can have a very active role in helping it not remain that way; by at least working toward making ourselves more loveable, and even helping others too in that same quest. There can be real and healthy flesh on that skeleton of duty. When we finally see it all as God sees it, there will no longer be any thought of duty; not because duty is gone, but because we have infinitely superseded and surpassed it.
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This is so often true among those who ardently want to love and serve God by bringing others to do the same. From the outside it seems as if dishing out God’s word in rebuke evokes in the rebuker the indignation he imagines to be God’s attitude toward any who do not recognize his rightful authority. But the pettiness of insisting on respect for the manner in which one attempts to convey God’s word is all that the hearer in the encounter receives. The rebuker may inject that at least he has done his best to do God’s will but there comes a point when it may be better to assess how adequate that best has been. If the one who rebukes does so only from duty and respects God primarily out of fear, it is doubtful he is ready to convey the love God offers - probably because he himself has not been able to properly receive it.
Dang I may have jumped in too soon just as the exchange between you and Randy got good. But now I have Santa duties to perform beginning in the kitchen. Enjoy the day!
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No fears of interrupting anything good, Mark! You’re part of what makes exchanges here good in the first place! Happy Santa duties.
I think this is an important insight. Nobody wants any received love to come from a sense of duty alone. And in fact we are rather sensitive about being the recipients of such ‘love’ - and rightly so. How impoverished must any believer’s thoughts of God be that such highest of loves - the source of Love itself, could be thought to be reduced to that.
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Just now ran across these lines from the book “The Baron’s Apprenticeship” that you put me on to, Randy!
Instead of blaming as a matter of course the person who does not believe in a God, we should think first whether his notional God is a God that ought, or a God that ought not to be believed in. Perhaps he only is to be blamed who, by inattention to duty, has become less able to believe in a God than he was once: because he did not obey the true voice, whencesoever it came, God may have to let him taste what it would be to have no God. For aught I know, a man may have been born of so many generations of unbelief, that now, at this moment, he cannot believe; that now, at this moment, he has no notion of a God at all, and cannot care whether there be a God or not; but he can mind what he knows he ought to mind. That will, that alone can clear the moral atomosphere, and make it possible for the true idea of a God to be born into it.
The above passage was all in reference to the main story character who has grown up with mainly antagonistic thoughts toward his theistically religious culture because of his perceptions of the people in his community and how he saw them representing such a God (also through his step dad’s non-believing eyes). And this character is falling in love with a woman for the first time - though he’s only just coming into contact with this new-for-him thing called ‘love’.
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I like this … pretty much typical Macdonald…that doing your duty has the godly, not just common, grace of communing with God. He also notes that God is not removed by some gnostic knowledge, but meets us where we are. In other portions of the book, he notes that the protagonist Richard can be more noble in terms of duty and love to fellow man than many who take on God’s label. Thanks
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Huh.
The antinomian, fearful of being pharisaical, decries ‘the law’, declaring observance of it to be legalistic and antithetical to grace. Rightly construed, promoting obedience to the law accentuates God’s grace through Jesus, precisely because we all fail to be obedient in so many ways.
And thank you for that, @Randy! There are rules, ‘laws of love’. They are not only rules, but rulers, and we are told in the epistles to do exactly that, to measure ourselves. Jesus more than intimates it as well, in at least Matthew 5 where he speaks of good deeds and the laws of love continuing, offering a cup of water to the thirsty, caring for widows and orphans, even if we need to do it sacrificially.
Antinomians on the other hand are effectively denying laws of love. For instance, speed limit laws and reckless driving laws are laws of love, rulers to measure ourselves by. We are not behaving lovingly towards our neighbor, the neighbor whom we are supposed to love, if we are driving recklessly or at 50mph in a residential neighborhood, endangering their children. Those who say there is no law incumbent on Christians except ‘luv’ are effectively denying speed limits and the underlying laws and telos, denying the need for speed limit signs and speedometers because as Christians all we need to do is “be loving.”
Regarding speed limits, I heard one pastor talk about how he was once vacationing in Germany with his family. For, fun, he decided to go on the autobahn (where there are no speed limits as you know). As he was accelerating down the highway getting a good dose of adrenaline from the thrill, his wife beside him said quietly “remember that you love your children”. Suddenly, the jolt of that hit his brain and the “thrill” of pushing the limits faded, as he slowed waaayy down to a normal road speed. The pastor said that love had succeeded in curbing his behaviour in absence of a “law”–because love of another “governed” his internal state-a relationship of his own choice, not by external coercion. The problem with legal speed limits, he said, is that it is simple human nature to always push the boundaries. To rebel. Can I get away with going 5 km/h over the limit before I get caught? Can I get away with 10? Not that he was advocating getting rid of speed limits in a world filled with a lack of love. Simply making the point that laws don’t “solve” the fundamental problem of human rebellion.
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But he had a ‘law’ in his mind that he was measuring against, “a reasonable speed limit”. I would think it likely that came from posted speed limits that he was accustomed to. (I used to drive a little sports car, so I hear you! ; - ) Sports car drivers tend to fallaciously elevate their and their cars’ abilities to be ‘safe’ – love is not all you need.
I certainly agree. But they are still measurements, and we are still told to test ourselves. Against what?
Grace to trust and obey is what solves the fundamental problem of human rebellion (for each of us individually), and that only comes through Jesus. (That is one of the reasons we celebrate Christmas. ; - )
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Not necessarily, he said he wasn’t trying to “target” any particular speed limit, only drive in a way that was safe (loving) to those others in the car with him… To match his behaviour against the standard of love. Yes, I agree that standard is demonstrated ultimately by Jesus–who kills our inner rebellion.
Of course, you raise the ethical conundrum of what to do if one is alone in one’s hot little sports car 
with no one else’s love on the line, no one else to care for… how to then behave? Is there something about love towards oneself? so that one may effectively love others in the future?
Merry Christmas!
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(Jesus obeyed the laws of love and told us to do the same. ; - )
Merry Christmas to you too, my sister! 
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I think that this is good…and also had another thought that this good illustration prompted after reading a copy of Cynthia Tobias’ book on strong willed children. One person’s struggle is not another’s. Some of us really struggle with rules, and others are rule lovers…not that those are the less apt to sin, as with the older brother in the prodigal son. It is interesting how Jesus’parables deal with both tendencies.
For example, I was not one who ever wanted to race a car, touch paint or walk on grass where the sign said not to. My fault would be to look down on those who did …which would be failing in the spirit of the law, much more than the letter.
So, Macdonald’s writings may deal more with the heart of the compliant older child, as opposed to the strong willed child prone to overt rule breaking, as I think he may have been compliant one himself.
Again, both sins can be equally damaging. However, as with Henri Nouwen’s meditation on the Return of the Prodigal Son, sometimes it is harder to look for the heart beyond the outward behavior.
I like your illustration. Thanks!
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