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What Love Wants
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147 What Love Wants London, twenty-First sunday after trinity, october 21, 1934 z Traditionally the Lutheran Church has required men and women studying to be pastors to learn Hebrew and Greek, the original languages of the Old and New Testaments. At school, Bonhoeffer had been taught the classical Greek of Plato and Aristotle. As part of his theological training, he also learned Koine Greek, the language of the New Testament. Greek was the common language spoken throughout the Roman Empire in Jesus’ time, when there were many local languages as well, including Aramaic, which Jesus spoke. The apostle Paul, a Jewish Roman citizen, spoke Greek and could communicate with the Corinthians and other Christian communities in Greece in their own tongue. In 1 Corinthians 13, Paul uses the word agape, which we translate as “love.” Another Greek word, eros, also means “love,” and both are used in English to help us distinguish erotic and possessive love from the kind of which Paul is speaking here. In English, agape may be a name for a Christian celebration, a “love feast,” but it also has a far deeper meaning. This sermon, the second in a series that Bonhoeffer preached on 1 Corinthians 148 • tHe CoLLeCted serMons oF dietriCH BonHoeFFer 13, helps to define this unconditional love. Psychology since his time has convinced us that some self-love is healthy, but such love must be as much in the image of agape as of eros—self-forgiving, self-accepting. z 1 Corinthians 13:4–7: Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. z Last Sunday we learned that despite all our ideals, our seriousness, our knowledge, and our faith, even our good deeds and sacrifice, our lives are worth nothing if we do not have that one thing that Paul calls love. So it could be that our whole life is meaningless, even if we do our full duty, earnestly and with all our might—because it is done not out of love but out of pride or fear or the vanity of our hearts. And that all our piety is not worth a penny either, if people say of it that it “has not love.” But if all human life and activity amount to nothing without love, we are confronted with the question: What is this love on which everything depends? What is this love, without which all of us are nothing? It is true that no one lives entirely without love. Every person has love within him or her and knows its power and passion. Each of us knows, furthermore, that it is this love that makes our whole life meaningful; that without this love that we know and have, we could just throw away all our lives—they would no longer be worth living. However, this love, with its power and passion and meaning, which everyone knows, is self-love—our love for our own selves. This is what fulfills us and gives us energy to be active and inventive; it is that without which life would not be worth living . So we do know love, but only in a fiendishly distorted way, as in a mirror—as self-love. But this self-love is love that has gone wrong, that has fallen away from its origin. It is self-satisfied and is therefore condemned never to bear fruit—a love that is really hatred of God and my brother and sister, because they could only disturb me within the tight little circle I have drawn around myself. It has all the same power, the same passion, the [34.226.141.207] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:39 GMT) wHAt LoVe wAnts • 149 same exclusiveness as real love—here or there. What is totally different is its goal—myself, rather than God and my neighbor. But self-love is also clever. It knows that it is only a distorted likeness of love’s original image. So it pretends, veils itself, and dresses itself up in a thousand different forms, trying to look like real love—and it succeeds so well that human eyes can hardly tell the difference between the real thing and the fake. Self-love disguises itself as love...