There is a local law professor who wanted to know the greatest and most important commandments for Jewish life. The story Jesus tells, with a stranger stopping to aid–and bearing the burden to save–a man’s life, is a radical redefinition of love.
Jesus tells the law professor that all he has to do to gain eternal life is to love God and to love his neighbors as himself. The professor’s response is interesting. He asks Jesus, well, who is my neighbor? In other words, who exactly is on that list? You can almost picture the law professor’s inner monologue in real time… he wants to make sure he checks all the boxes, does what needs to be done to secure eternity.
But there is a subtle undertone to the question too… surely, there MUST be a list of who counts as my neighbor and who doesn’t. Surely, there must be a particular set of insiders I’m required to love, but there’s no way that can include everyone. I can’t do that; think about how many strangers there are in the world, let alone enemies. The law professor wants to know if he can, and where to, draw the lines of his love. Surely, no one can love everyone.
So stands the scandal of the love ethic.
The love ethic is a radical notion because it challenges those of us, and those impulses in each of us, that assume surely we can’t love everyone. Not everybody.
But the love ethic replies; yep, everybody.
Behind the claim that the love ethic means every body are some pretty big ideas.
It means every single person is worthy of love. That might seem vague, or pious, or naive; but what if it were just…true. Every single person bears the weight of glory. Every single person is saturated with so much dignity that they leave traces of that mystery everywhere they go. And every body, regardless of their resume of success or failure, carries with them some unmerited quality that renders them worthy of love. No one lives outside the boundary of love.
So Yes Everyone
And every single person can love everyone. We think one of the great ingredients of our humanity is the way our worthiness creates an aptitude for love. In other words, you have the capacity to love others in ways you also deserve to be loved, simply because you are human.
The challenge, of course, is that those two things are easier to talk about than to embody. There are so many ideas and conventions at work in society and in our personal lives that war against convictions around our inherent worthiness and unlimited capacity for love. At the same time, it is precisely those challenges that makes the love ethic so essential. Solving our deepest social problems will require harnessing and living into our limitless capacity for love. Cultivating the conditions for widespread human flourishing will not come at the end of a cost-benefit analysis; it will come from enacting beliefs about the inherent dignity of every human person.
We are living in an era defined by loneliness, resentment, and moral exhaustion. When health risk indicators expand to include the rise of social disconnection, we know we have a problem. There is an alternative; a moral vision that invites us to see love as a virtue we are wired to develop. Not only for friends and loved ones. We believe our flourishing depends upon expanding this skill even to strangers and adversaries.
The seedbeds of the love ethic are everywhere though… if we have eyes to see them. People everywhere are countering the impersonal, the transactional, the distrusting, and exclusivity of so many social norms with profound acts and ways of life marked by a commitment to love in response to human dignity.
As radical as the love ethic is; there is something in each of us that wants to believe that love is for everybody.
As the Love Ethic Network grows, we invite you to join us on the journey, read these observations and witness the manifestations of love working itself out in the field. Consider this your field journal for a world worth choosing.
