The Demands of Agape Love

Paul took conventional Jewish religiosity and stripped it down to what he considered its fundamentals.  Many of the earliest disciples were Jews who continued to practice the ancient traditions that are defined in the Hebrew Bible, such as dietary restrictions and purity laws.  Paul said that these things don't matter.  The sole requirement of the follower of Jesus is to love one another.

On the surface, this sounds trite.  This is only due to our culture's watered down trivialization of the term "love." In Paul's Greek language, there were several terms that fell within the meaning of the English word "love." These included philia, eros, and agape.  Philia is what we think of today as devotion and adherence to those who are like us.  Agape is the most challenging form of love, and it is the term that Paul uses when he says that we are called to love one another.

Agape can be considered love of the stranger, the alien, and even the enemy.  Agape means devotion and concern for those who are strangers to us.  Paul looked around him and saw hatred, anger, and violence, all stemming from humanity's unwillingness to practice agape love.

The basis for our ethos as followers of Jesus should always be concern and devotion for the stranger, because in doing so, we are emulating God, who sought our salvation when we were strangers to God and lost in sin.

Changing our Perception of Death

The ancient Middle East was terrified of death.  Death was often represented in the ancient Middle East through unstable waters, like floods.  Most Middle Eastern cultures had stories of great floods that resulted in death and destruction.  Middle Eastern cultures developed rituals to placate the gods and powers that they thought were responsible for death.  Mythologies arose that attempted to explain the nature and significance of what lay beyond this world.

Our culture is terrified of death too.  We respond in different ways than in the ancient world, but we remain terrified of death.  We try to deny the aging process with medical procedures.  We romanticize youth and health.

In the Christian tradition, through the resurrection of Christ, we know the truth about death that the world does not know.  We know that death is not a monster to be fought or to be feared, because it has no power over us.  Death, in the sense of being perceived as an end and termination of existence, is an illusion.  What we perceive as death is simply a transition from one form of existence to another.  We are eternal beings whose existence does not end.  It just changes.

The early Christian community saw this changed perception of death revealed in symbolic form in the story of Jesus calming the storm when the disciples were trapped in a boat.  As ancient people, there was nothing so terrifying as unstable water.  Jesus revealed to the disciples that God controls the waters, and symbolically, death.  We are God's people now living under God's dominion, and when we pass from this world, we will remain God's people living under God's dominion.  We don't have anything to fear.