Travelers

Love and Sadness

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling. Matthew 23:37

To love is to choose a certain type of suffering, or to say it differently, to care about anything is to mourn the imperfections in everything. Jesus’ love inevitably led to heartache over a lifeless system and the resistance of those who controlled it. Love cannot be without suffering in this life if it is truly love.

The more we desire a true expression of goodness in the world, in human society, or in ourselves, the more we will become aware of how far our present reality is from that ideal expression. The correspondence is direct, and the sadness of what we see around us is unavoidable.

Suffering that involves some specific instance of hardship or a tragic circumstance might at first not be thought to be related to love. But when we deeply and profoundly desire the good, true, and beautiful, we will always recognize when it is absent, or at least only partially realized.

If we love justice, then we are pained by injustice. Until we live in the fullest expression of God’s reign, the love that longs for the genuine must also confront the sadness of what has not yet come.

Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Matthew 6:10

This part of Jesus’ prayer for us is both wish and lament; a hope for a promise and the acknowledgement that it is not yet realized. The love of God’s way is attended by sadness, inescapably.

Divine love engenders in us a resilient hope for a better future. No genuine love can be satisfied with the unfulfilled possibility of what we know could be, even though it happens only through God’s grace and power and at a time uncertain to us.

However, the constant recognition of what is deficient, and the inherent sadness that it brings, cannot extinguish the generative love of which it is part. This is not a sad suffering opposed to love, but its complement. We need to remember that love hurts, which is why Jesus is the man of sorrows, familiar with grief (Isaiah 53:3).

If we can be dissuaded from love because of heartache, it wasn’t love in the first place. All we had was a desire for a shallow happiness which lacks deep affection. No longing for the truth, the good, or the beautiful, is erased because it has not fully come. In fact, the absence only strengthens the determination to love.

There is a lot of “groaning” in Romans 8:22-26: creation, ourselves, and the Spirit. This is the sound of love for the true, good, and beautiful. God is loving and suffering with us. In love we groan as does the Spirit in us for the time when God is all in all, and there is nothing else.