"Is Sacrificial Love Possible?"
As a parish pastor for almost thirty-nine years it has been my pleasure to preside over more than two hundred weddings. In almost all of these weddings I have not failed to give a homily. Most of the time I have had one message to share. My words of wisdom have been based directly or indirectly on two biblical texts, 1 Corinthian 13 and John 15:9-13. I have preached that your marriage will be happy to the extent that both people practice sacrificial love. I have found in being in a relationship, and in dealing with other people in couple relationships, that the most important thing is being able to surrender being right and having things your own way to your partner. It is to be willing to practice sacrificial love.
What is sacrificial love? In The Four Loves English professor and late-in-life converted Christian C. S. Lewis expresses it well in his depiction of any kind of true love: ““There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”
In other words, true love is to somehow remain invulnerable, thoughtless of others, independent as much as possible. But if one is to follow Christ, one cannot do so. Paul expresses it well when he writes: “Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is not jealous or rude. Love does not insist on its own way. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, love never fails.” But Paul may be speaking here of the love that only God has. For Christian people is true sacrificial love possible?
Adherents of ethical egoism would see it not only to be impossible, but to be an unworthy goal. After all, why should you sacrifice any of your own happiness for that of another person? But most Christian ethicists would value sacrificial love as the highest kind of human behavior. Differences in viewpoint would then vary as to how much in ourselves we can love sacrificially? Can any true agape love, sacrificial love, originate from us in our human nature?
I don’t think sacrificial love is possible without motivation and help from above. The motivation comes from John 15: “Love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, to give His life for His friends.” If we believe that God in Christ loved us to the extent of sacrificing His Son for us then we are moved to love others, at least that special someone, with sacrificial love. To do this we will need the work of the Holy Spirit in us, to lead us to not hold on to grudges or always being right, but to be willing to lay down our rational nature for the sake of the relationship, and to be vulnerable. This is the highest form of love.
Yes, C.S. Lewis is right—this kind of love hurts! “Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.” But sacrificial love is what will keep our relationships together. On February 14 as we celebrate love in relationships, let us celebrate the possibility of human beings to have sacrificial love. If we are in that kind of relationship, let us remember to thank God, who gives us the example, the motivation, and the courage to love unselfishly.
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