Affection can make us more Godly
Regular Network Ipswich columnist James Knight talks about the effect of truly loving one another in his Easter message
-------------------------------
Whether in this Easter period we are feeling that life is good or bad, easy or hard, simple or complex, or wherever we are geographically in the world, something remains true - something I have always found quite astounding; if you take the entire 14 billion year history of the universe and put it into the timescale of a 24 hour clock, the history from when man first became a cognitive being who could construct analytical models with himself as part of those models, up to the present day, would be compressed into a fraction of a second on that 24 hour clock. Man was made in the image of God, and when one thinks of that vast universal timescale and just what humans have achieved in the comparably miniscule time since God put a bit of Himself into man, it really does put things into perspective. Jesus Christ said what are undeniably the most powerful and influential words ever spoken, and in a lifetime that would amount to just a fraction of that fraction of a second on that 24 hour clock He spoke the words of a person who was the visual representation of the God who created that entire 14 billion year cosmic history. It is certainly true that many other great figures in human history have made a huge impact in the world, but as I reflect on my love for Jesus over Easter, my heart seems to glow into words that speak into the whole of my life, saying loudly and clearly - there has been no one like Jesus before.
Aside from His claims of Divinity, the main thing that sets Him apart for me is this. Although He spoke the most amazing moral wisdom and kindness, He followed those words with a very candid caveat; that His words would divide families and cause His followers to be hated. Why is that? The great moral teachings of Confucius or Aristotle or Abraham Lincoln or William Wilberforce or Ghandi or Martin Luther King were not entirely unimpeachable when compared with Jesus, but also they never gave even the first suggestion that their moral teachings would cause people to hate or resist or divide. So how could Jesus’ perfect words that laid out the blueprint for the best and most moral world be accompanied by the notion that such words would cause hate and resistance and division? Clearly what we are seeing is that the answer lies not in the intrinsic moral teachings, for I doubt even the most staunch atheists could deny their truth or their quality, rather the answer must lie in who Jesus claimed to be, and the truth that our recognising that those morals came directly from God is bound to be a burden on the souls that trivialised or rejected them. This of course was always bound to cause a division between those who recognise these teachings as the teachings of God Himself and those who fail to see their true origin; hence even in a relatively peaceful and loving family, division can occur when there is disparity over who Jesus really is.
 The problem that such hatred, resistance and division brings is that while most of us may be united on our views about moral goodness, we remain disparate when it comes to the most important issue – from whence those miracles came. If the Christian is right, and those morals came from God, a man cannot be personally enriched until he recognises Christ as our Lord (however moral he is on the outside). I think this enrichment begins when one starts to develop affection for the principles that enrich, to the point where one enjoys being Christ-like – thus affection for Christ as a person may well be the first signpost one sees in a twilight forest with a large search space.
But what does affection for Christ mean and why would we encourage it? Well, we must first notice the good that affection does us in everyday life. Its primary quality is that it can help us develop a caring attitude towards those who we do not much like or those who have done us wrong. By trying to make ourselves come to like someone in spite of their shortcomings we can engender a form of affection, and that affection is how we focus on their good points and avoid resentments or getting our own back. I think this pattern can be mirrored in our search for a relationship with Christ; that is, the more affection one develops for Christ the more one can accept His morals and His wisdom, and the more of God one can see in Him.
The love we are expected to feel for God can only be made manifest if there is a feeling that in some way resembles God. If affection is accepting someone despite their ills and wrongs, then this must be a factor in Divine love, for He must stretch His levels of affection, not just beyond what we deserve but into realms of generosity that would be quite outrageous (for further analysis of this, see my article ‘Dealing with a world full of difficult people’ here).
Each of us when we come to know God can see the bigger picture; that we have an important role in His ultimate plan. It is not so different to when a boy who has never found employment finally goes out and gets a job doing something which he feels is really making a difference in small pockets of the world. To develop a liking for a prospect, even in principle, is often the catalyst for doing it, and affection is really the first sense of keenness that comes along and hints at our getting out of a rut, perhaps even liking ourselves enough to want make those positive steps.
What God wants us to do is get out of the habit of negative thinking, because we soon find that all the reverence for affection which we held dear in the negative life will still be there in the positive life, but those which were hindering our growth will often turn into good pleasures - dispraise into praise, description into definition, friendship into love, frustration into self-understanding – the transformation is all about enrichment.
And here we are beginning to see the key to how affection can make us more Godly even before we have got to know God properly; affection in spite of doubt helps us look through the unhelpful distractions and focus on the positives; we learn how to see pleasures for what they really are - not to be used in obedience to our own sin - but to be reconfigured to harmonise with the spirit of our real and true desire to know Him. But this is not just good practical advice for coming to know Jesus - we Christians can apply this wisdom as we reach out to help people – those out there who are in real trouble and need not just love, but affection too.
One of the main things that affection does is that it assures people in bad situations that they are loved. But why do I say ‘affection’ when surely love will suffice by itself – after all, isn’t love the most powerful of all virtues; why do we need affection? What we are really exploring here is what affection can do that love cannot. Not too much until one considers the situation from the person supposedly in the wrong - someone caught up in a life of sin from which they cannot easily escape. Affection is that constituent part of love that goes beyond love for love’s sake - after all, we Christians are told to love everyone, whether they are likeable or not. Thus if one can show affection for a person as well as a love for them that almost shocks them into embracing the love, it should short circuit from their mind the horrible doubt that some feel about being loved only because God forces us to love.
This probably explains why there are so many good organisations out there helping prostitutes, drug addicts, recidivists, and homeless people, but much fewer organisations assigned the job of helping lustful men and women in clubs. The practical imperatives that allow room for affection in the organisations that help people in the most desperate situations are underpinned by the fact that Christ singled out those in the worst situations as those most in need, but furthermore there is something vital that we must not overlook. Notice how in Christ’s day the worst sinners had no hesitation about coming forward and seeking His help, yet these days the worst sinners of today so often hide away from Christians, acting as though the Christian way of life is a way that does not apply to them. It would help if we thought back again to how Christ handled the situation; for I do not believe it was simply His love that attracted sinners to Him, it was His love coupled with genuine affection for them - He did not love because He had to, He loved because He wanted to – and that is what I think affection is, not just the obligatory loving, but the loving of loving.
Affection when supplementing love opens doors for all kinds of positive feelings - fondness, empathy, compassion, generosity, and tolerance - and it can make those who feel unwelcome and worthless in the company of Christians feel better about themselves; they can feel as the sinners in a Palestine felt when meeting Christ. Feeling loved helps them feel wanted, but affection helps them feel as though there are things about them that are likeable and renewable – that they are machines that can be fixed with a new part here and a new bolt here, not one destined for the scrapheap.
The term has often been used that Jesus was a ‘friend of sinners’ – and that I think is because He was able to demonstrate His love for the person sinning beyond the levels that focus on the sins themselves. He loved those who seemed unlovable – what we would see today as the bullies, the losers, the wrongdoers, the failures, the down and outs, the lepers, the downtrodden, the undesirables, and those on the forgotten fringes of society; but He was only able to do this because He looked through the outside layers of grunge, through the stained out garments, and through the coating of decadence right into the image of God that is in each man and woman.
Our Lord did not equate the sins of man with the inherent make-up as originally desired by our Creator - He identified them as a solecism against the ground of the person’s very being. The numerous sins were chains that enslaved the man and stopped him from being free to be the man that God created him to be. That is why Jesus was able to be the best ‘friend of sinners’ that we can imagine – His affection for them as human beings, His deep concern for their well-being, and His abounding love for His lost sheep settled His account with regard to their salvation. It is as C.S Lewis says:
It’s easy to acknowledge but almost impossible to realise for long, that we are mirrors whose brightness, if we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us.
As we take ourselves into the Easter period, it is good to ponder the fact that the goodness that comes from us is a gift from God Himself. Just as the cross represents His biggest gift to the world - all of our qualities derive from Him first, and after the resurrection and since Pentecost the best gift He has to give us is Himself, through the Holy Spirit. Therefore the badness that manifests itself into the solecisms against our very being are the parts that Christ looks through when He loves us because He wants to focus on the light, and He knows that the more light He focuses on the cleaner we will be and the more blessed He will make us.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The views carried here are those of the author, not of Network Ipswich, and are intended to stimulate constructive debate between website users. We welcome your thoughts and comments, posted below, upon the ideas expressed here. You can also contact the author direct at james.knight@norfolk.gov.uk
James is a Norwich local government officer, author and Proclaimers church member in Norwich.
Meanwhile, if you want to find out more about Christianity, visit: www.rejesus.co.uk
., 29/03/2010
|
