Real Love

It's easy to be cynical about Valentine's Day – or about love generally. We struggle with what exactly we mean by love; there are alternatives calling themselves love that are, in fact, intent on hijacking the real thing. There are those who ‘love’ but are really only interested in sex and those who ‘love’ because it gives them a much-needed sense of self-worth. So how do we identify ‘real love’? The answer is surprisingly straightforward. In real love the other person always comes first. It is about caring and giving rather than demanding and taking. There is a selflessness about real love that is absent in its imitations. Real love is a priceless gift that can make us generous and selfless. Almost everybody who falls in love is made better by it. In a cynical age we need to defend the value of real love.

But I want to suggest that real love is also one of the pointers to God. There are just a handful of things that can make even the most hardened sceptic stop and feel: the birth of a baby and the death of a loved one, for example. A third is the experience of falling in love. In a world where some say that everything can be explained by science, love dramatically demonstrates that there is more to existence than we can discover in the laboratory. You can forget ‘survival of the fittest’ when it comes to love: the most unlikely couples can be bonded by its strange magic and there are many human loves that have long exceeded any biological ‘sell-by date’. There is something magnificently incomprehensible about love. It defies logic and tells us that there are questions that we need to think about. The experience of love may be the basis of the first step of faith.

Yet love is not just a pointer to the fact of God, it is also a pointer to his character. Love is a magician, turning the most monochrome lives into multi-coloured extravaganzas, transforming a cold person into a poet, changing an introvert into an extrovert or reforming a realist into a romantic. Love cannot be limited, legislated, bought or sold. Love descends on the richest and the poorest alike and transcends barriers of race, culture and class. In the very selflessness that is the hallmark of real love we see a reflection of the God who loves and who the Bible tells us is love (1 John 4:8). Our love for each other is a scaled-down, manageable version of God's love towards us. It is as if the God who so loved the world that he gave his only Son to rescue it has placed in our hearts a small sample of what he feels for us.

So let's celebrate Valentine's Day and the magic of real love. Love may not be the answer to the world's problems but it is a pointer to the one who is the answer.

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