The Love of Christ - Spontaneous or Measured?

“Now great crowds accompanied him, and he turned and said to them, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.  Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace.” Lk 14:25-32 (ESV)

You know, every time I think I have God, or life, pretty well figured out and I start rummaging through the Bible, then-ZAP! Some new shaft of light shatters my neat little God-package or life-package. My cozy figuring out is undercut or deflated, and I've got to take a fresh look at the whole business again.

Of course if this didn't happen the Bible would have no authority for us. It would not convey a word from the beyond at all; it would simply be a dull, commonplace book, handy to have around to confirm me in my prejudices and partial understandings. Inasmuch as the Bible is the Word of God, then by its very nature it has to startle, confuse, mess-with, surprise and shake us up.

The Word of God refuses to let me spell me, my life, or God, with the letters of my alphabet.

A case in point are the two little parables in the fourteenth chapter of Luke about a man building a tower and a king planning warfare.  So what's so surprising about all that? Isn't this just ordinary folk wisdom, hard business sense, sound military strategy? The boardroom of a big corporation, with sound business heads deciding on expansion on the basis of costs, earning capacity, and the state of the economy? Or the high strategy session in the Pentagon, with colonels and generals figuring out every deployment, the state of the military budget, and probable body-count? Or a family sitting down to decide whether they can manage the mortgage payments on a new house? No, there's nothing very surprising here; it's just plain horse sense to count up the cost before making a venture.

What is surprising is what it does to a totally different approach to discipleship, to the expression of love, in so much of the New Testament where the emphasis is just the opposite of this prudent, cautious, cost-counting approach. It's the mystery, the wonder of love offered spontaneously, freely, with abandon.

How many times shall I forgive – seven times? No, seventy times seven.

If a man forces you to go one mile, go with him two.

If he strikes you on the right cheek, offer him the left, and if he wants your corduroy jacket, offer him your topcoat too.

If you love those who respond to you in friendship and love, so what? Love your enemies where you can count on nothing in return. If the wine at the wedding feast runs low, I'll drown them in more wine than they can possibly drink.

And who ends up in outer darkness? The one-talent man who was precisely the cautious, prudent, counting-the-cost kind of guy.

So Jesus lived, apparently, with an abandon of love, scattering His seed over all kinds of ground, not counting the cost of scattering seed on beaten paths, on rocks, or among weeds.

So Jesus went about offering His unconditional love to every Tom, Dick, and Harry: prostitutes, call girls, racketeers, blind beggars, and God knows what all! The spontaneity of it, the uncalculating spirit, the generosity of it – this is what makes it a mystery and gives it wonder, and draws us to Him.

It's the spontaneous, uncalculating expression of love, of care for others, which seems closest to the spirit of Christ and gives life much of its wonder, mystery, and joy. It is perhaps the one quality above all others that has come to dominate the definition of Christian love and Christian mission.

Such is how I thought I had it all figured out. That it is precisely this delightful spontaneity, this not counting the cost, which is of the essence of Christian love, of the way God would have it happen among us, and approach the work of His Church.

So what gives with Jesus suddenly talking about calculating the cost? The ridicule heaped on the tower builder who had not counted the cost and wasn't able to finish? Or the king waging warfare who was commended because he was willing to compromise when he found he was outmanned by the opposition?

Good God, isn't it better to venture love even if we can't carry through on it?

Isn't it better to fight for love and justice in our world even if we know that the opposition will probably shoot us down?

At least this is the quality which draws us to make heroes isn’t it?

So what goes on here? Well, for one thing, in the context of His words, Jesus’ words suggest that the spontaneous offers of love, service, sacrifice and even mission work, may well be no more than an emotional kick, an expression of feelings, our feelings, rather than a consideration of the effect that those feelings may have on others, especially the one so emotionally moved.

You recall that incident along the road where a woman, all carried away with her emotions, blurted out to Jesus, “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts at which you nursed!” (Lk 11:27). To which Jesus replied tartly, "Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!" (Lk 11:28). He was not about to let that woman get away with an outburst of feelings without counting the cost of what it did mean for Mary to have such a son, with the sword piercing her soul down through the years.

What Jesus is saying in these two little parables is that there is something demonic about love that does not count the cost and, having counted the cost, carry through on it.  

No doubt this is why Luke places these two illustrations immediately after bluntly stating: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” (Lk 14:26-27)

To say Jesus is indicating that love for the neighbor immediately establishes priorities is not to water down his word one bit: those priorities can be devastating to our normal way of living!

Paul Monka in his delightful little book Meditations in Universe, provides what is perhaps the most erroneous, and yet the most appealed to justification when spontaneity wears off: "All's well that means well." Nothing could be farther from the truth and what our Lord is getting at here.

The world is full of grief and loneliness and tragedy because of people like you and me who meant well, but didn't count the cost. The tragedy that seems to unfortunately define the African-American community in our country results not alone from the arrant racists, prejudiced and bigoted, as found in the popular spin, but from a hundred plus years of people on both sides of the issue, people like you and me who meant well.

What is the tragedy? Seldom has anyone really faced up to, and owned the cost of it all!

God help the neighbor if our love for him begins and ends simply with our feelings for him. Why is it most mission leaders and organizations are lost as to how to do missions? If you look behind the charts, demographics and into the toolboxes they’ve made for themselves, they cannot find any easy, quick, micro-wave type way of loving the lost cheaply. The faithfulness, the ongoing, the enduring path of missions isn’t an option because it cost too much, we can’t get it to be self-sustaining. How ironic that we, who cannot live a moment without the Lord’s love, expect those we love to get to a point that they can live without our love and all that it supplies. How shall we ever get to loving our enemies and doing good to those who persecute us.

Beyond that, these little parables suggest that love had better take sharp stock of the nature, quality, and size of the opposition. We'd better know what we're up against, and what we're up against is the monumental tragedy in human life, as well as human perversity, evil, and sin. All in all, that is awesome opposition. Which is why the basic ingredient in the Biblical understanding of love, whether divine or human, is not the feeling of love, but faithfulness. It is God's faithful love which is asserted over and over again in the Old Testament. And when Job and others questioned the love of God for them, it was the faithfulness of that love in times of suffering and death which was in question. And in the New Testament it is the faithfulness of love even unto death which is central.

In how many marriage ceremonies has what is pledged been changed from a pledge to be faithful, to a pledge to love? As God instituted it, marriage is not first and foremost about pledging our feelings of love, but the pledging of our faithfulness in sickness and in health, for better or worse.

And as for friendship, you know from your own experience it is the faithful ones, those who stick by you no matter what, who are the treasured ones. Others may be more fun to be with, more charming, but, by God, when the chips are down it's the faithful ones we are grateful for, even if they happen to be pretty dull customers.

Rollo May points out the need for faithfulness in love by contrasting it with the hippie movement back in the 60’s and 70’s.

Hippie love emphasizes immediacy, spontaneity, and the emotional honesty of the temporary moment.... The immediacy, spontaneity, and honesty of the relationship experienced in the vital now are sound. . . . But love also requires enduringness. Love grows in depth by virtue of the lovers experiencing encounter with each other, conflict and growth, all over a period of time. These cannot be omitted from any lasting and viable experience of love.

While this movement reminds us of the wonder and mystery of love's spontaneity, it still does so without love’s enduringness or faithfulness, so that it droops and fades.

This can best be summed up in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who points out that God defines love; love does not define God. And as God defines love, it is both spontaneous, free, uncalculating, given with abandon and at the same time prudent, cautious, aware of the cost and the opposition.

The old, old story of the Good Samaritan still tells it best: There was the spontaneous and immediate seizure of the moment, the now, in response to the poor guy in the ditch beside the road. But that was not all. He counted the cost, picked him up, set him on his donkey, took him to the inn, and saw to it that he was cared for. He saw it through. Both spontaneity and faithfulness.

If we have to sacrifice one for the other, faithfulness is more to be desired than spontaneity. Love without spontaneity can of course, as many today complain, be dull and drab, boring, lacking the flash that generates not faithfulness of love, but its feelings. But love without faithfulness is chaotic, if not demonic.

It isn’t by mistake that much of the mission work within the church has long been dominated by spontaneity rather than faithfulness. How much of our mission effort is driven by the fact that we can count the number of flashes of mission that catch and wow the eyes of all, but faithfulness, how can we count that in anything but cost?

Any attempt in fulfilling the great commission must live according to the mysterious, wondrous love that is faithful and steadfast. For this is the very way God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit set upon both the creation and salvation of the entire world.

Perhaps the reason this way of doing both Church and mission has been abandoned by so many is because when both are held together –the instant feeling of compassion, the warmth, the spontaneity, plus the counting the cost of faithfulness – then we are defining love as God defines it, not spelling it by the letters of our own alphabet.

By Edmund Steimle, God the Stranger

Revised and edited by Pastor Mark W. Love.