Love

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  I answer that, Peace implies a twofold union, as stated above [2586](A[1]). The first is the result of one’s own appetites being directed to one object; while the other results from one’s own appetite being united with the appetite of another: and each of these unions is effected by charity—the first, in so far as man loves God with his whole heart, by referring all things to Him, so that all his desires tend to one object—the second, in so far as we love our neighbor as ourselves, the result being that we wish to fulfil our neighbor’s will as though it were ours: hence it is reckoned a sign of friendship if people “make choice of the same things” (Ethic. ix, 4), and Tully says (De Amicitia) that friends “like and dislike the same things” (Sallust, Catilin.) Reply to Objection 1: Without sin no one falls from a state of sanctifying grace, for it turns man away from his due end by making him place his end in something undue: so that his appetite does not cleave chiefly to the true final good, but to some apparent good. Hence, without sanctifying grace, peace is not real but merely apparent. Reply to Objection 2: As the Philosopher says (Ethic. ix, 6) friends need not agree in opinion, but only upon such goods as conduce to life, and especially upon such as are important; because dissension in small matters is scarcely accounted dissension. Hence nothing hinders those who have charity from holding different opinions. Nor is this an obstacle to peace, because opinions concern the intellect, which precedes the appetite that is united by peace. In like manner if there be concord as to goods of importance, dissension with regard to some that are of little account is not contrary to charity: for such a dissension proceeds from a difference of opinion, because one man thinks that the particular good, which is the object of dissension, belongs to the good about which they agree, while the other thinks that it does not. Accordingly such like dissension about very slight matters and about opinions is inconsistent with a state of perfect peace, wherein the truth will be known fully, and every desire fulfilled; but it is not inconsistent with the imperfect peace of the wayfarer. Reply to Objection 3: Peace is the “work of justice” indirectly, in so far as justice removes the obstacles to peace: but it is the work of charity directly, since charity, according to its very nature, causes peace. For love is “a unitive force” as Dionysius says (Div. Nom. iv): and peace is the union of the appetite’s inclinations. Whether peace is a virtue?Objection 1: It would seem that peace is a virtue. For nothing is a matter of precept, unless it be an act of virtue. But there are precepts about keeping peace, for example: “Have peace among you” (Mk. 9:49). Therefore peace is a virtue.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  I answer that, The preposition “for” denotes a relation of causality. Now there are four kinds of cause, viz., final, formal, efficient, and material, to which a material disposition also is to be reduced, though it is not a cause simply but relatively. According to these four different causes one thing is said to be loved for another. In respect of the final cause, we love medicine, for instance, for health; in respect of the formal cause, we love a man for his virtue, because, to wit, by his virtue he is formally good and therefore lovable; in respect of the efficient cause, we love certain men because, for instance, they are the sons of such and such a father; and in respect of the disposition which is reducible to the genus of a material cause, we speak of loving something for that which disposed us to love it, e.g. we love a man for the favors received from him, although after we have begun to love our friend, we no longer love him for his favors, but for his virtue. Accordingly, as regards the first three ways, we love God, not for anything else, but for Himself. For He is not directed to anything else as to an end, but is Himself the last end of all things; nor does He require to receive any form in order to be good, for His very substance is His goodness, which is itself the exemplar of all other good things; nor again does goodness accrue to Him from aught else, but from Him to all other things. In the fourth way, however, He can be loved for something else, because we are disposed by certain things to advance in His love, for instance, by favors bestowed by Him, by the rewards we hope to receive from Him, or even by the punishments which we are minded to avoid through Him. Reply to Objection 1: From the things it knows the soul learns to love what it knows not, not as though the things it knows were the reason for its loving things it knows not, through being the formal, final, or efficient cause of this love, but because this knowledge disposes man to love the unknown. Reply to Objection 2: Knowledge of God is indeed acquired through other things, but after He is known, He is no longer known through them, but through Himself, according to Jn. 4:42: “We now believe, not for thy saying: for we ourselves have heard Him, and know that this is indeed the Saviour of the world.” Reply to Objection 3: Hope and fear lead to charity by way of a certain disposition, as was shown above ([2573]Q[17], A[8];[2574] Q[19], AA[4],7,10).

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  And on the pastoral level, how can the truth of the cross be applied to the difficulties of real-life discipleship? The more we engage in any of these, let alone all four, the more we seem to be entering dangerous, contested territory. Things happen to distract us, to dismay us, to put us off track. I have observed this in my own work over many years and again in the writing of this book. I take this to imply that something really important is at stake. It is vital that we keep our nerve, say our prayers, and press forward. The aim, as in all theological and biblical exploration, is not to replace love with knowledge. Rather, it is to keep love focused upon its true object. We must not make the overwhelming experience of God’s love revealed in the cross of Jesus an excuse for mere muddle. As in a marriage, love doesn’t stand still. A passionately devoted young couple need to learn the long-term skills of mutual understanding, not to replace love, but to deepen it. It is of course better to hold on to love (whether that of God or of a spouse), even when we are confused, than to let go because we can’t understand it. But it is far better to address the confusions. It isn’t only faith that seeks understanding. Love ought to do the same; not of course in order to stop loving, but so that love may grow, mature, and bear fruit. Models and Doctrines So how did the story develop—the story, that is, of the ways in which the followers of Jesus have understood his death? Many books have been written on this topic alone, and I must here confine myself to a quick outline sketch. The great dogmatic disputes of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries focused on the questions of God, Jesus, and the Spirit. Their participants hammered out the official doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation. To be sure, they all believed that Jesus had “died for their sins,” and in sermons and longer writings they said many moving things about that death and what it meant. But it was never defined as such, never nailed down to one theory. When the sixteenth-century Reformation took place, many branches of the new churches articulated their particular theories of atonement in official statements, but the great ecumenical creeds of the early centuries did not do so. They merely restated the early formula we find in 1 Corinthians 15, as, for instance, in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (381): “For us humans and for our salvation he came down from heaven, and was incarnate . . . and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; he suffered and was buried.” The shorter Apostles’ Creed doesn’t even add “for us.”

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  You know how it is in the pagan nations. Think how their so-called rulers act. They lord it over their subjects. The high and mighty ones boss the rest around. But that’s not how it’s going to be with you. Anyone who wants to be great among you must become your servant. Anyone who wants to be first must be everyone’s slave. Don’t you see? The son of man didn’t come to be waited on. He came to be the servant, to give his life “as a ransom for many.” (10:42–45) Here we see the full integration of what have seemed to subsequent generations to be two key elements of the meaning of Jesus’s crucifixion. A new sort of power will be let loose upon the world, and it will be the power of self-giving love. This is the heart of the revolution that was launched on Good Friday. You cannot defeat the usual sort of power by the usual sort of means. If one force overcomes another, it is still “force” that wins. Rather, at the heart of the victory of God over all the powers of the world there lies self-giving love, which, in obedience to the ancient prophetic vocation, will give its life “as a ransom for many.” Exactly as in Isaiah 53, to which that phrase alludes, the death of the one on behalf of the many will be the key by which the powers are overthrown, the kingdom of God ushered in (with the glorious divine Presence seen in plain sight by the watchmen on Jerusalem’s walls), the covenant renewed, and creation itself restored to its original purpose. Mark 10:35–45 contains within itself more or less the whole of the New Testament’s complex but coherent vision of how Jesus’s death, completing his vocation as Israel’s Messiah, overthrew the dark powers that had enslaved the world by coming to take the place of sinners. The new Passover was accomplished by the new exile-ending “forgiveness of sins,” and the latter was accomplished through the one taking the place of the many. If we were to summarize what Mark has now told us, in both this passage (though we have not had time to follow it through) and his gospel as a whole, we might just as well say that “the Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Bible.” This, of course, points us to Paul, where we find that summary both stated and expounded. But, before we get there, some final reflections are in order on the death of Jesus in the gospels.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  The way John has told the whole story so far indicates that this is the moment of confrontation, of victory, of the completion of Jesus’s kingdom work. But Jesus, instead of marching into the Temple and facing up to the power brokers (he had done that already in chap. 2), takes his followers to the upper room and shares with them the secret of what is about to happen. Only he doesn’t simply explain it in words. Words point to the reality, and the reality is about flesh and blood; so Jesus explains his meaning in symbolic action and in the parables, warnings, comfort, and instruction that it generates. John’s gospel has brought us back again and again to the Temple. But now, though Jesus and his followers are not in the Temple but in a private room, John wants us to understand that we are looking at the true Temple. Jesus and his followers are standing for a moment at the dangerous intersection between heaven and earth. And over it all, and all that is to come, John speaks of love: covenant love, the divine love that goes all the way to the end (13:1). There was nothing that love could do for them that love did not do for them. And this is how it works. Jesus is enabling them to be there, in this new sacred space, by purifying them for God’s Presence. They need to be washed to have a share in his life. The foot-washing story follows the pattern of the famous poem in Philippians 2, which says that Jesus does not regard his equality with God as something to exploit, but empties himself, dies the slave’s death on the cross, and is then exalted. In this scene Jesus removes his outer garments and acts the part of the slave to cleanse the disciples. Then, after getting dressed again, he tells them he’s given them an example to follow. The foot washing is an acted parable of what Jesus is about to accomplish through his incarnation and death. He has laid aside the garments of heaven to reveal his glory on the cross, cleansing his followers so that they can be part of God’s new Temple, the microcosm of God’s new creation. But within the story of the foot washing we hear a dark and dangerous note. The satan, the accuser, has already put it into Judas’s heart to betray Jesus (13:2). Judas will be the accuser’s mouthpiece, embodying and enacting the great accusation, the anti-God, anticreation, antihuman force at large in the world. We recall how, at the start of Mark’s gospel, as soon as Jesus begins to announce God’s kingdom, there are demons shrieking at him in the synagogue (1:23–24). So here, as Jesus prepares for what is to come in this moment of deep intimacy, the satan is at work. The powers of evil are gathering for one last desperate attempt to thwart the divine rescue operation.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I was overcome by feeling for him, and it was painful not to touch him, even to reach my hand to his. Caution had become an instinct, and even here, if there wasn’t actual danger I could imagine the discomfort any display of affection would cause. But we had our repertoire of covert gestures, the brushed elbow or knee, the slight pressure of a foot, and we made use of them as the night deepened and the air chilled and the ruins stood out more eerily in the lights. Looking at them I felt, with a force beyond the figures of my children’s history, beyond any history at all, how ancient the place was; it was a battlefield we sat on, every inch of the ground had been steeped in blood, it must still be in the chemistry of the soil. At the end of the opera, when the scattered bodies had risen for their applause, R. seemed less moved than bemused, looking at me as if to say is that all? The ovations were long and generous, especially for Lakmé, who left the stage half-interred by flowers. Then, before we could rise, an announcement was made that in twenty minutes the spektakul zvuk i svetlina , the sound and light show over Tsarevets, would begin. This was famous enough that R. had heard of it, and he wanted to go, even though it was cold now, the chill had deepened through the performance, and we were both tired after the day. I had been disappointed by the light show the year before, and I wasn’t excited at the thought of sitting through it again; but it was short, fifteen minutes or so, and I resigned myself to it as we began to move with the crowd down the hill. There weren’t any lights to guide us, except for the beams of one or two flashlights some members of the audience had known to bring. There was stumbling and cursing, but also a kind of good cheer, people were laughing and chatting, and in the dark I slipped my arm through R.’s, pressing him against me. I knew he had been disappointed by the opera, which hadn’t brought about the closeness between us I had hoped for, and I felt in some obscure way that I had failed.

• From Story of O (1954)

  Oh, how could she forget him! He was the hand that blindfolded her, the whip wielded by the valet Pierre, he was the chain above her head, the unknown man who came down on her, and all the voices which gave her orders were his voice. Was she growing weary? No. By dint of being defiled and desecrated, it seems that she must have grown used to outrages, by dint of being caressed, to caresses, if not to the whip by dint of being whipped. A terrible surfeit of pain and pleasure should have by slow degrees cast her upon benumbing banks, into a state bordering on sleep or somnambulism. On the contrary. The bodice which held her straight, the chains which kept her submissive, her refuge of silence—these may have been responsible in part—as was the constant spectacle of girls being handed over and used as she was and, even when they were not, the spectacle of the constantly available bodies. Also the spectacle and the awareness of her own body. Daily and, so to speak, ceremoniously soiled with saliva and sperm, she felt herself literally to be the repository of impurity, the sink mentioned in the Scriptures. And yet those parts of her body most constantly offended, having become less sensitive, at the same time seemed to her to have become more beautiful and, as it were, ennobled: her mouth closed upon anonymous members, the tips of her breasts constantly fondled by hands, and between her quartered thighs the twin, contiguous paths wantonly ploughed. That she should have been ennobled and gained in dignity through being prostituted was a source of surprise, and yet dignity was indeed the right term. She was illuminated by it, as though from within, and her bearing bespoke calm, while on her face could be detected the serenity and imperceptible smile that one surmises rather than actually sees in the eyes of hermits. When René had informed her that he was leaving, night had already fallen. O was naked in her cell, and was waiting for them to come and take her to the refectory. As for her lover, he was dressed as usual, in a suit he wore every day in town. When he took her in his arms, the rough tweed of his clothes irritated the tips of her breasts. He kissed her, laid her down on the bed, lay down beside her and, tenderly and slowly and gently, took her, alternating between the two tracks open to him, before finally spilling himself into her mouth, which he then kissed again. “Before I leave,” he said, “I would like to have you whipped, and this time I’ll ask your permission. Do you agree?” She agreed to it. “I love you,” he repeated. “Ring for Pierre.”

• From Story of O (1954)

  Two years earlier, before she had met and fallen in love with René, she would have sworn: “Fatal for Sir Stephen” and have added: “and he’ll know it too.” But her love for René and René’s love for her had stripped her of all her weapons, and instead of providing her with any new proof of her power, had stripped her of those she had previously possessed. Once she had been indifferent and fickle, someone who enjoyed tempting, by a word or gesture, the boys who were in love with her, but without giving them anything, then giving herself impulsively, for no reason, once and only once, as a reward, but also to inflame them even more and render a passion she did not share even more cruel. She was sure that they loved her. One of them had tried to commit suicide; when he had been released from the hospital where they had taken him, she had gone to his place, had stripped naked, and forbidding him to touch her, had lain down on his couch. Pale with pain and passion, he had stared at her silently for two hours, petrified by the promise he had made. She had never wanted to see him again. It wasn’t that she took lightly the desire she aroused. She understood it, or thought she understood, all the more so because she herself felt a similar desire (or so she thought) for her girl friends, or for young strangers, girls she encountered by chance. Some of them yielded to her, and she would take them to some discreet hotel with its narrow hallways and paper-thin walls, while others, horrified, spurned her. But what she took—or mistook—to be desire was actually nothing more than the thirst for conquest, and neither her tough-guy exterior nor the fact that she had had several lovers—if you could call them lovers—nor her hardness, nor even her courage was of any help to her when she met René. In the space of a week she learned fear, but certainty; anguish, but happiness. René threw himself at her like a pirate at his prisoner, and she reveled in her captivity, feeling on her wrists, her ankles, feeling on all her members and in the secret depths of her heart and body, bonds less visible than the finest strands of hair, more powerful than the cables the Liliputians used to tie up Gulliver, bonds her lover loosened or tightened with a glance. She was no longer free? Yes! thank God, she was no longer free. But she was light, a nymph on clouds, a fish in water, lost in happiness. Lost because these fine strands of hair, these cables which René held, without exception, in his hand, were the only network through which the current of life any longer flowed into her.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  But that’s not how it happens in Israel’s scriptures. The biblical promises of redemption have to do with God himself acting because of his unchanging, unshakeable love for his people. This theme runs like a scarlet thread through the scriptures, going back at least to Deuteronomy: You are a people holy to YHWH your God; YHWH your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession. It was not because you were more numerous than any other people that YHWH set his heart on you and chose you—for you were the fewest of all peoples. It was because YHWH loved you and kept the oath that he swore to your ancestors, that YHWH has brought you out with almighty hand, and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. Know therefore that YHWH your God is God, the faithful God who maintains covenant loyalty with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations. (Deut. 7:6–9) Although heaven and the heaven of heavens belong to YHWH your God, the earth with all that is in it, yet YHWH set his heart in love on your ancestors alone and chose you, their descendants after them, out of all the people, as it is today. . . . He is your praise; he is your God, who has done for you these great and awesome things that your own eyes have seen. (Deut. 10:14–15, 21; cf. 4:37) Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. . . . For I am YHWH your God , the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as your ransom , Ethiopia and Seba in exchange for you. Because you are precious in my sight , and honored, and I love you , I give people in return for you , nations in exchange for your life. (Isa. 43:1, 3–4) For he said, “Surely they are my people , children who will not deal falsely”; And he became their savior in all their distress. It was no messenger or angel , but his presence that saved them; in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; he lifted them up and carried them all the days of old. (Isa. 63:8–9) I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you. (Jer. 31:3) The steadfast love of YHWH never ceases , his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. (Lam. 3:22–23) When Israel was a child, I loved him , and out of Egypt I called my son.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  I answer that, Since a precept of law is binding, it is about something which must be done: and, that a thing must be done, arises from the necessity of some end. Hence it is evident that a precept implies, in its very idea, relation to an end, in so far as a thing is commanded as being necessary or expedient to an end. Now many things may happen to be necessary or expedient to an end; and, accordingly, precepts may be given about various things as being ordained to one end. Consequently we must say that all the precepts of the Old Law are one in respect of their relation to one end: and yet they are many in respect of the diversity of those things that are ordained to that end. Reply to Objection 1: The Old Law is said to be one as being ordained to one end: yet it comprises various precepts, according to the diversity of the things which it directs to the end. Thus also the art of building is one according to the unity of its end, because it aims at the building of a house: and yet it contains various rules, according to the variety of acts ordained thereto. Reply to Objection 2: As the Apostle says (1 Tim. 1:5), “the end of the commandment is charity”; since every law aims at establishing friendship, either between man and man, or between man and God. Wherefore the whole Law is comprised in this one commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” as expressing the end of all commandments: because love of one’s neighbor includes love of God, when we love our neighbor for God’s sake. Hence the Apostle put this commandment in place of the two which are about the love of God and of one’s neighbor, and of which Our Lord said (Mat. 22:40): “On these two commandments dependeth the whole Law and the prophets.” Reply to Objection 3: As stated in Ethic. ix, 8, “friendship towards another arises from friendship towards oneself,” in so far as man looks on another as on himself. Hence when it is said, “All things whatsoever you would that men should do to you, do you also to them,” this is an explanation of the rule of neighborly love contained implicitly in the words, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”: so that it is an explanation of this commandment. Whether the Old Law contains moral precepts?Objection 1: It would seem that the Old Law contains no moral precepts. For the Old Law is distinct from the law of nature, as stated above ([2071]Q[91], AA[4],5;[2072] Q[98], A[5]). But the moral precepts belong to the law of nature. Therefore they do not belong to the Old Law.

• From Story of O (1954)

  While they were talking to O, the two women who had come to dress her had been standing on either side of the stake where she had been whipped, without touching it, as though it terrified them, or as though they had been forbidden to touch it (which was more likely); when the man had finished, they came over to O, who realized that she was supposed to get up and follow them. She therefore got up, gathering her skirts in her arms to keep from tripping, for she was not used to long dresses and did not feel steady on the mules with thick soles and very high heels which only a thick satin strap, of the same green as her dress, kept from slipping off her feet. As she bent down she turned her head. The women were waiting, the men were no longer looking at her. Her lover, seated on the floor leaning against the ottoman over which she had been thrown at the beginning of the evening, with his knees raised and his elbows on his knees, was toying with the leather whip. As she took her first step to join the women, her skirt grazed him. He raised his head and smiled, calling her by her name, and he too stood up. Softly he caressed her hair, smoothed her eyebrows with the tip of his finger, and softly kissed her on the lips. In a loud voice, he told her that he loved her. O, trembling, was terrified to notice that she answered “I love you,” and that it was true. He pulled her against him and said: “Darling, sweetheart,” kissed her on the neck and the curve of the cheek; she had let her head fall on his shoulder, which was covered by the purple robe. Very softly this time he repeated to her that he loved her, and very softly added: “You’re going to kneel down, caress me, and kiss me,” and he pushed her away, signaling to the women to move aside so he could lean back against the console. He was tall, but the table was not very high and his long legs, sheathed in the same purple as his robe, were bent. The open robe stiffened from beneath like drapes, and the top of the console table slightly raised his heavy sex and the light fleece above it. The three men approached. O knelt down on the rug, her green dress in a corolla around her. Her bodice squeezed her; her breasts, whose nipples were visible, were at the level of her lover’s knees. “A little more light,” said one of the men. As they were adjusting the lamp so that the beam of light would fall directly on his sex and on his mistress’s face, which was almost touching it, and on her hands which were caressing him from below, René suddenly ordered: “Say it again: I love you.” O repeated “I love you,” with such delight that her lips hardly dared brush the tip of his sex, which was still protected by its sheath of soft flesh. The three men, who were smoking, commented on her gestures, on the movement of her mouth closed and locked on the sex she had seized, as it worked its way up and down, on the way tears streamed down her ravaged face each time the swollen member struck the back of her throat and made her gag, depressing her tongue and causing her to feel nauseous. It was this same mouth which, half gagging on the hardened flesh which filled it, murmured again: “I love you.” The two women had taken up positions to the right and left of René, who had one arm around each of their shoulders. O could hear the comments made by those present, but through their words she strained to hear her lover’s moans, caressing him carefully, slowly, and with infinite respect, the way she knew pleased him. O felt that her mouth was beautiful, since her lover condescended to thrust himself into it, since he deigned publicly to offer caresses to it, since, finally, he deigned to discharge in it. She received it as a god is received, she heard him cry out, heard the others laugh, and when she had received it she fell, her face against the floor. The two women picked her up, and this time they led her away.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  All this is framed, like so much of the New Testament, within the story of Passover (John 13:1). As we have seen throughout this book, the first Christians knew that Jesus had chosen Passover as the frame within which his death would mean what it was meant to mean. Judas, energized by the satan, is like hard-hearted Pharaoh, who won’t let Israel go, so that when the victory comes it will be decisive and final. And the love, the “uttermost” love, that Jesus pours out is the sharply focused divine covenant love, which had made promises to Abraham, promises that his descendants would be freed from slavery and given their inheritance, promises that were fulfilled when this love came down to Egypt to rescue them. John is telling the story of the new Exodus, the new tabernacle, and of course the new Torah: “I am giving you a new commandment,” says Jesus. “Love one another . . . just as I have loved you” (13:34). The people who are rescued by the cross and the love it reveals will then be shaped by the cross and the love it will reveal through them to the world: “This is how everybody will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for each other” (13:35). This is how we learn not only to tell the story of Jesus, but also to live the story of Jesus. There is a straight line from here to Jesus’s commissioning of the disciples in John 20 and particularly to his recommissioning of Peter in John 21. This is the source, and the shape, of all Christian mission. There is a poignant final passage in John 13. Peter realizes that Jesus is going to a place of great danger, and he declares that he will follow him and give his life for him (13:37). The reply is full of gentle, sad irony. Will Peter lay down his life for Jesus? Actually, in an hour or two Peter will find he is still part of the problem, not part of the solution. The complex musical lines of the story are brought together into the single great chord, dark and glorious, that heralds the unveiling of utter love. So here, in a passage that is narrative and not dogma, we have all the elements of a Christian understanding of the cross. We have the cleansing from sin that allows access to the divine Presence. We have the ultimate defeat of evil: the satan has done its worst and has been overthrown. We have the example of self-giving love to be followed, so that the world may believe. And we have the sharply personal challenge: Will you do this for me? Look to yourself, and be thankful that I will do it for you.

• From Story of O (1954)

  “Oh, how I love you,” he murmured. With trembling hands he took off his clothes, turned out the light, and lay down next to O. She moaned in the darkness, all the time he possessed her. The welts on O’s body took almost a month to disappear. In places where the skin had been broken, she still bore the traces of slightly whiter lines, like very old scars. If ever she were inclined to forget where they came from, the attitude of René and Sir Stephen were there to remind her. René, of course, had a key to O’s apartment. He hadn’t thought to give one to Sir Stephen, probably because, till now, Sir Stephen had not evinced the desire to visit O’s place. But the fact that he had brought her home that night suddenly made René realize that this door, which only he and O could open, might be considered by Sir Stephen as an obstacle, a barrier, or as a restriction deliberately imposed by René, and that it was ridiculous to give him O if he did not at the same time give him the freedom to come and go at O’s whenever he pleased. In short, he had a key made, gave it to Sir Stephen, and told O only after Sir Stephen had accepted it. She did not dream of protesting, and she soon discovered that, while she was waiting for Sir Stephen to appear, she felt incomprehensibly peaceful. She waited for a long time, wondering whether he would surprise her by coming in the middle of the night, whether he would take advantage of one of René’s absences, whether he would come alone, or indeed whether he would even come at all. She did not dare speak about it to René. One morning when the cleaning woman happened not to be there and O had gotten up earlier than usual and, at ten o’clock, was already dressed and ready to go out, she heard a key turning in the lock and flew to the door shouting: “René” (for there were times when René did arrive in this way and at this hour, and she had not dreamed it could be anyone but he). It was Sir Stephen, who smiled and said to her: “All right, why don’t we call up René.” But René, tied up at his office by a business appointment, would be there only in an hour’s time. O, her heart pounding wildly (and she wondering why), watched Sir Stephen hang up. He sat her down on the bed, took her head in both his hands, and forced her mouth open slightly in order to kiss her. She was so out of breath that she might have slipped and fallen if he had not held her. But he did hold her, and straightened her up.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Yet Paul rubs their noses in the point that this is the Messiah pattern, the cross pattern. This is how the victory was won. Jesus himself went to the place of shame and degradation. This is how the revolution was launched; this is how it makes its way in the world. And this is why, for every one person today who reads Seneca, Plutarch, or Epictetus (among the greatest philosophers of Paul’s day), there are thousands who read Paul and find his message life-giving. This is why too for every theologian who puzzles over abstract definitions of “atonement,” there are thousands who will say, with Paul, “The son of God loved me and gave himself for me”—and who will then get on with the job of radiating that same love out into the world. I suspect that this message about the necessity of suffering has not been fully understood in today’s church, especially in the comfortable Western churches to which I and many of my readers belong. We all know in theory that the Christian life will involve suffering. Yet those who are eager for “bringing the kingdom,” for social and cultural renewal in our day, can easily forget that the revolution that began on the cross only works through the cross. And those who are eager to “save souls for heaven” are likely to regard suffering simply as something through which most of us some of the time and some of us most of the time will have to pass, rather than as something by means of which the rescuing love of God is poured out into the world. The latter is closer to the mark. “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” This well-known quotation from the African theologian Tertullian, writing around AD 200, reflects the early Christian perception that suffering or dying for the faith is not simply a necessary evil, the inevitable concomitant of following a way that the world sees as dangerously subversive. Suffering and dying is the way by which the world is changed. This is how the revolution continues. This is etched into the New Testament at point after point. We return once again to Acts, this time to chapter 12. The fact that the victory had already been won when Jesus died did not mean that Herod wouldn’t kill James, but it did mean that Peter was then wonderfully rescued from jail. Acts offers no explicit interpretation of this strange combination of events. Had I been James’s mother or wife, I think I would have chafed at the strange providence that worked its victories in such apparently random fashion, and I would only partly have been comforted by reflecting how Jesus’s own mother had felt at the foot of the cross. Or take Acts 16.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  When, in the New Testament, we find a strong emphasis on one particular set of Passover events fused together inextricably with the notions of dealing with sin, return from exile, and of course the kingdom of God and other related ideas, this combination of ideas provides the natural context of meaning. Third, the Passover context contributes, through its dramatic theme of the rescuing and guiding Presence of YHWH himself, the sense that the redemption, when it comes, will come through the personal, powerful work of Israel’s God himself. The Maccabean literature may indeed flirt with the possibility, borrowed from the non-Jewish themes of the “noble death” on behalf of others, that the martyrs may somehow have taken upon themselves the divine wrath. But the only biblical passage that might be read in that way—Isaiah 53—forms the climax of a matchless poem whose overall theme is the powerful and unchangeable love of the one God. When we find, in the New Testament, a repeated emphasis on the love of God as the driving agent for this great act of forgiveness and new Exodus—when the early Christians said things like, “God so loved the world that he gave his son,” or “The son of God loved me and gave himself for me,” or “Nothing in all creation shall be able to separate us from the love of God in the Messiah”—then we should be in no doubt that they were intending to draw on this entire narrative, focused particularly on Isaiah and Daniel. This brings to the fore more sharply than before some key theological questions. How, in Isaiah, can the shameful, cruel, and unjust death of the “servant” be a revelation of the divine love for Israel? And who is this “servant,” anyway? This last question has kept scholars up at night for many generations. That indeterminacy seems to me quite deliberate. As I said before, like many poets and other writers, whoever wrote Isaiah 40–55 did not want to make it too easy, did not want to foreclose on options. This is not the place to reopen an old, vexed, and many-sided question. But two brief points may be made in concluding this already overlong chapter. First, it really does look as though the sequence of Servant Songs (42:1–9; 49:1–7 [or possibly 1–12]; 50:4–9; 52:13–53:12) carries at the least overtones of the “royal” passages in the first part of the book (9:2–7; 11:1–10) and the similar, presumably messianic, passages in the later parts (61:1–4; 63:1–6). There is a well-known fluidity between the nation and its royal representative: the king holds the key to the destiny of the people. (That too is an old and difficult question, but some sort of “royal representation” makes a great deal of sense in the texts and the world of the time.) The “servant,” then, is some kind of “anointed” figure through whose work YHWH will bring justice to Israel and the nations, reminding us of Psalms such as 2 and 72.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  It was written for us as well! It will be calculated to us, too, since we believe in the one who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was handed over because of our trespasses and raised because of our justification. (4:23–25) This is not, to be sure, a straightforward quotation from Isaiah 53, though there are several verbal echoes. Nobody who knew Isaiah 53, especially in the Greek version, would miss the resonance. Though Paul has put the point in a fresh way, this conclusion succeeds in summarizing the larger argument and claiming powerfully and evocatively that what has happened in Jesus fulfills not only the Torah, as witnessed in the exposition of Genesis 15 in Romans 4 as a whole, but the Prophets as well. That is what Paul claimed in 3:21, and he has now demonstrated it. But this resolution of the ultimate problem, this “punishment that made us whole” (Isa. 53:5), means what it means and makes the sense it makes not within the moralistic works contract, an abstract scheme of sin and punishment, but within the covenant of vocation, the image-bearing, glory-sharing covenant. The human vocation, Israel’s vocation, Jesus’s vocation. God’s vocation. Incarnation is indeed at the heart of Romans 3. But incarnation here is not the alternative to election, to the purposes of God for Abraham’s people. Jesus in himself, and in his death, is the place where the one God meets with his world, bringing heaven and earth together at last, removing by his sacrificial blood the pollutions of sin and death that would have made such a meeting impossible. “While we were enemies,” writes Paul in Romans 5:10, summing up the present argument once more, “we were reconciled to God through the death of his son.” Quite so. It isn’t all about “works,” whether done or not done. And it isn’t all about “punishment.” It is about vocation, and about Temple. And about love. Love (another great Isaianic theme) is, after all, the deepest meaning behind Paul’s language of “covenant justice.” The covenant is after all the marriage of God and Israel. Paul picks up that language in many passages where he speaks about the Messiah himself and his people—a sure sign that he sees in Jesus the human embodiment of Israel’s God. (I am sometimes taken to task for using the word “embodiment” in this context, as though I am shy of saying “incarnation.” I am not, as the previous paragraphs indicate. It’s just that I regularly prefer English terms to Latin—particularly when the Latin terms have worn so smooth with use that not all their proper features are visible.) It is to that marriage and to its purpose that God has been faithful.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  It was hard for Paul’s audience to understand this. They lived, as we do, in a competitive society where everyone was eager to look good, to be successful, to impress the neighbors. The beaten, bedraggled figure of Paul was hardly that of a leader one might to be proud of. Yet Paul rubs their noses in the point that this is the Messiah pattern, the cross pattern. This is how the victory was won. Jesus himself went to the place of shame and degradation. This is how the revolution was launched; this is how it makes its way in the world. And this is why, for every one person today who reads Seneca, Plutarch, or Epictetus (among the greatest philosophers of Paul’s day), there are thousands who read Paul and find his message life-giving. This is why too for every theologian who puzzles over abstract definitions of “atonement,” there are thousands who will say, with Paul, “The son of God loved me and gave himself for me”—and who will then get on with the job of radiating that same love out into the world. I suspect that this message about the necessity of suffering has not been fully understood in today’s church, especially in the comfortable Western churches to which I and many of my readers belong. We all know in theory that the Christian life will involve suffering. Yet those who are eager for “bringing the kingdom,” for social and cultural renewal in our day, can easily forget that the revolution that began on the cross only works through the cross. And those who are eager to “save souls for heaven” are likely to regard suffering simply as something through which most of us some of the time and some of us most of the time will have to pass, rather than as something by means of which the rescuing love of God is poured out into the world. The latter is closer to the mark. “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” This well-known quotation from the African theologian Tertullian, writing around AD 200, reflects the early Christian perception that suffering or dying for the faith is not simply a necessary evil, the inevitable concomitant of following a way that the world sees as dangerously subversive. Suffering and dying is the way by which the world is changed. This is how the revolution continues.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  WHEN MY MOTHER TALKED ABOUT relationships, she didn’t have much to say about intimacy. “You need two things in a marriage,” she told me. “You need the will to make it work and you need to be able to make compromises. It’s not hard to be right, but then you are right and alone.” My father, who was always less pragmatic than my mother, more than filled the quota for expressiveness and demonstrativeness. He openly adored and adorned her with kisses, gifts, and attention. But if I had asked him whether or not they had intimacy, he would have looked at me perplexed, not knowing what I was talking about. He knew love, and he knew partnership, and they implicitly included the vastness of intimacy. For my parents and others of their generation, the modern discourse on intimacy would have eluded them altogether. Their relationship was far from perfect—they might have come to therapy for any number of reasons—but the notion of “working on their intimacy” would have been alien to them. When Tevye, in Fiddler on the Roof, tells his wife, Golde, that he will allow his daughter to marry the man she loves (instead of the man he has chosen for her), he frames his decision with the understanding that “this is a new world.” It’s a world where people marry for love, far distant from the world in which he met Golde on their wedding day and was told by his father that he would learn to love her in time. Now, twenty-five years later, as he witnesses the burgeoning love of his daughter, he asks his wife if she does love him, after all these years. Golde answers with an amazing list of experiences they’ve shared in their life together, and she gives a beautiful and lyrical description of how the “old world” used to think of love and marriage. She washed his clothes, milked his cow, shared his bed, starved with him, fought with him, raised his children, cleaned his house, and cooked his meals. “If that’s not love, what is?” she asks. Knowing that Golde loves him doesn’t change anything, but Tevye ends the song by acknowledging that “after twenty-five years, it’s nice to know.”

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  But the overwhelming historical impression from the gospels as a whole is of a human being doing what Israel’s God had said he would do, of a human being embodying, incarnating what Israel’s God had said he would be across page after page in Israel’s scriptures. The new Passover happened because the pillar of cloud and fire—though now in a strange and haunting form, the likeness of a battered and crushed human being—had come back to deliver the people. The covenant was renewed because of the blood that symbolized the utter commitment of God to his people, the lifeblood that spoke of divine protection, of God’s self-giving love. Paul, in Acts 20:28, speaks of “the church of God, which he purchased with his very own blood.” Forgiveness happened because the “arm of YHWH” was “wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities” (Isa. 53:5). The cross became the encoded symbol as well as the actual outworking of the dying, and hence the undying, love of Israel’s God. 10 The Story of the Rescue THE BRITISH ARE noted for their sense of irony, often applied particularly to themselves. Self-deprecating humor is, at least in theory, our stock in trade. One current example is a brilliant and rightly popular BBC sitcom called W1A, which is the postal code for the headquarters of the BBC itself. The satire, created by people who themselves work for the organization they are sending up, is often telling as well as very funny. In one now famous episode, while a middle-aged broadcasting executive is trying to figure out how to solve a particular problem about a program, he is being badgered by a young, sassy eager beaver of a PR agent who has her own agendas. The man keeps trying to explain to her that she doesn’t understand the question, and she keeps trying to explain to him how her proposals are going to solve everything and make the program a roaring success. Eventually, exasperated, he turns on her. “You’re just not listening!” Back comes the answer, pitch-perfect for the character: “I totally am listening! What it is—you guys aren’t saying the right stuff!” I was reminded of that moment when reflecting on the ways in which the four gospels have routinely been ignored by people trying to construct a vision of the atonement, trying to understand the meaning of Jesus’s death. The long tradition of in-house church discussions about such things, swapping theories and schemes for how precisely to understand what happened on Good Friday, has emerged—especially in popular culture—from a world where it was assumed, as we saw earlier, that the point of Christianity was how to go to heaven granted that we are all sinners deserving hell. That is the agenda: How do we get to that goal? The four gospels have very little to say about this topic.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Once again, there is no notion that these people died as substitutes for somebody else—they sacrificed their lives, but not because a substitute was required. We move from ordinary language to the anthropological meaning of sacrifice, namely, as a ritual practiced in many premodern societies, including the world of the Bible. “Sacrifice,” as the Latin roots of the word suggest (from sacrum facere, “to make sacred”), meant making something sacred by offering it to God. In the ancient world, sacrifices most often involved animals. In some cultures there were also sacrifices of grain and precious objects. What they had in common was that they were gifts to God. The sacrifice of animals often involved a meal as well. The animal was offered to God, made sacred by being given to God, and then portions of it were eaten by those offering the sacrifice—the meal became a sacred meal, a meal with God. Sacrifice, gift, and meal commonly went together. Sacrifices served different purposes. Some were sacrifices of thanksgiving. Nothing was wrong, nothing was asked for, gratitude alone was the motive. There were sacrifices of petition, in which something was wanted from God. These were most often offered in times of community peril. Some were sacrifices of reconciliation, a means of repairing or overcoming a breach in the relationship with God. Here the dynamic of gift and meal is especially evident. On the level of human interaction, how do you mend a relationship that has been broken? How do you “make up” with someone you have wronged? You give a gift or share a meal, or both. So also sacrifices as a means of reconciliation were about giving a gift to God and sharing a meal with God. Together they were a means of at-one-ment: becoming one with God by eating sacred food with God. Sacrifice was not about substitution. When an animal was sacrificed, the notion was not that God was punishing an animal instead of a person; it was not about an animal suffering and dying instead of a human being. The point is that Paul’s language about Jesus’s death as a dying “for us,” as a “sacrifice,” does not in itself mean that Jesus was being substituted for us. Indeed, we need to make the statement stronger. To see Paul’s understanding of the death of Jesus as a substitutionary sacrifice for sin is to import into the notion of sacrifice a meaning that it did not have in the ancient world, including the world of Paul. Indeed, substitutionary atonement theology is completely counter to the thought of the radical Paul. So we return to our central claim. When Paul speaks of Jesus dying for others and as a sacrifice, he uses this language to refer to the depth of God’s love and Christ’s love for us. Paul’s claim is that God’s character and passion are revealed in Jesus. What we see in Jesus reveals what God is like.