Will you dare to love as Christ loves?

Welcome to Lent and Loving, the final episode of St Augustine’s College of Theology’s Lent 2025 podcast. 

This week, our principal, Alan Gregory, invites you to reflect on love—its challenges and its power.

As the philosopher Thomas Hobbes once suggested, does self-interest drive us, or are we wired for deeper connection? From everyday kindness to life’s greatest sacrifices, love is at the heart of being human.

Alan challenges us to go beyond surface-level kindness and embrace love fully. Love stirs our longings, but it is agape—the self-giving love of God—that transforms lives. 

Lent is a time to practice this love: to forgive, serve, and extend grace, even when it’s difficult.

As we approach Easter, Alan encourages us to take small but intentional steps toward love, trusting that even the smallest seed of love can grow into something extraordinary.

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We had a teacher at school we called NBS.

NBS stood for nasty, brutish, and short.

This was largely unfair since other than never having to worry about

low doorways, the guy was rather kindly and quite concerned about us.

The phrase nasty, brutish, and short, though we probably didn't

know this at the time, comes from the 17th century English philosopher

thomas Hobbs.

It is his description of human life outside the controlling

bounds of a strong social order.

Left to themselves, human beings don't play well together.

By nature, we are competitive.

We seek our interests to the exclusion of others, and we are

prone to offense and easy violence.

Selfishness is the word written indelibly on the human heart.

All that may ring true for you.

Our contemporary savagery at the level of global politics supports the grim

view, and not yet a century after the world's most devastating war.

Today, the image of the economic man, and the gender is appropriate here,

haunts our politics and culture.

Economic man, out what he or she can get,

competitive, individualistic, pursuing selfish desires, tamed

only by the beneficent operation of the capitalist free market,

where selfishness is supposedly harnessed to the benefit of all.

Many Christians, of course, have assumed that this picture of selfish humanity

boils down to what we mean by sin.

It doesn't, though.

The chains of aggressive self concern are certainly part of the picture.

Sin though is more subtle, and quite capable of turning out dressed to the

nines in virtuous, unselfish appearance.

Recently, evolutionary and behavioral scientists, as well as

psychologists, have challenged our bitter picture of selfish humanity.

Human beings, they argue, stand out among the animals by their

capacity for social cooperation.

Even our most sociable evolutionary relatives, primates like bonobo apes,

come nowhere near us in the diversity, strength, and scale of the social

bonds we create, nor in the discomfort, danger, suffering, endurance, and

struggle it takes to maintain them.

You see, animals don't queue well.

Put an overflowing bowl of food in front of three great Danes,

and queuing in an orderly manner

will not occur to them.

Anyone who's waited for a bus in Berlin knows that some nations get the knack of

queuing rather less happily than others.

Even Berliners though, do not maul each other, nor leave bloody

clumps of fur at every bus stop.

Queuing is just one example of remarkable cooperative behavior that many of

us perform without much thought.

True, I fantasized about shouting anthrax at a slowed grocery

checkout, but I've never done it.

It's an appalling idea, not to mention self-defeating.

I'm going on about this because it's Lent, and my Lenten theme is love.

Our grasp on ourselves as God's creatures is very limited.

Human beings are diverse, puzzling, and the more you know about

them, the more questions pop up.

As made in God's image, we are also irreducibly mysterious.

There is that about us eternally beyond our knowing.

Caricatures, therefore, don't help get us the understanding

we need for discipleship, for a basic working Christian wisdom.

Economic man, Hobbs' universal brute, these caricature us.

Social bonds, cooperation, reciprocity, collaboration.

These turn out to set the primary terms for human lives.

Our competitiveness, hatred, violence, selfishness, which is

all real enough, arises within the essential context of sociability.

Yet here, at least one researcher has said too much.

A recent study concludes that science has now discovered and proved

what all the religions have taught about the need to love one another.

Is this quite true though?

Does the love of which the New Testament speaks, the love which it dares to

name as the very being of God, really come down to nurturing the cooperative

dimension of our evolutionary inheritance?

We shouldn't take that sociability lightly, of course, we should

thank God for this capacity.

At the least, it's a condition for any higher love to

which God's spirit draws us.

It's a start, as we say.

Yet we should also remember that some of the most terrible things human beings

have perpetrated, warfare, not least among them, require extraordinary feats

of human cooperation, social organization.

Where next, then to look for love.

"I look at her and she looks at me.

In her eyes I see the sea.

I don't see what she sees in a man like me.

She says she loves me.

Her eyes, yeah, her eyes.

Her eyes are a blue million miles".

Lines from a tender and quirky love song from the sadly late Captain Beefheart.

The Greeks call this eros, the desire in which we forget ourselves for the sake of

a beauty that intimates an eternal joy.

In her eyes,

I see the sea.

Her eyes are a blue million miles.

When we see in another person a beauty and a goodness that no human being can

truly bear, eros has grasped us, stretched our heart to the hem of infinity.

I have two sicknesses, wrote an ancient Greek poet, love and poverty.

Poverty.

I can stand, but the fever of love is unbearable.

Eros disturbs us out of ourselves, intoxicates us with unsatisfaction.

Turns the heart insatiable.

Eros demands more.

Always more.

More of you, my beloved.

Though you will age and die, more of you.

I'm sick with Love, says the Song of Songs.

Many waters cannot quench love, nor full lus drown it, and only

a fool would try and buy it.

Eros is the cry of life for life without end.

When the desire for justice rages and leaps beyond all reason

and excuses, that too is eros.

When Creation's beauty takes us out of ourselves and leaves us

smitten, eros has come upon us.

The poem, the painting, the music that dislodges the heart from

the daily tick of time, and gives us now and a touch of forever.

Then Eros has stirred in us.

The word eros does not appear in the New Testament, yet the love that

is Eros seeks through its restless longing, what the scriptures call glory,

which is the light and goodness of God gathered into its perfect beauty,

blazing in a deep and dazzling darkness.

Since God is no hoarder though, and not niggardly in the slightest with

the divine life of this glory, God has gifted creation with its traces.

So that finite creatures and finite things should in their radiance

speak the divine word itself.

God shares his glory, shares it enough that it's a poor and tragic

creature whom Eros never visits.

Thanks to eros, to this yearning for eternal beauty, we are

not merely sociable creatures.

We are lovers.

The New Testament never uses the word eros.

But nonetheless, the gospels tell us about a time when the disciples saw the very

glory that Eros seeks, here in the flesh,

and full for a moment.

Jesus took with him, Peter and James and John, his brother, and led them

up a high mountain apart, and he was transfigured before them and

his face shone like the sun, and his garments became white as light.

Eros as such then remains unnamed in the New Testament, though it does gain

itself a place, and a rich one, in the first millennium of the church's history.

The word we do find in the New Testament, of course, is agape.

It's agape that Paul puts alongside hope and faith to say that such love never

ends and is the greatest of virtues.

Agape names the love that is God's last word on the subject.

So much so that the author of 1 John writes, God is agape.

No one, he adds, has ever seen God.

But if we love one another, God abides in us and his love agape is perfected in us.

We have not left Eros behind here though.

God desires to share his fullness without measure.

A sixth century theologian tells us that God yearns, and that this

yearning, this eros, carries God away, intoxicated into an unstinted giving.

Creation, roars and crashes,

then continents settle and slowly start to buzz and bustle with creatures.

God's yearning keeps the beat of this moving, evolving, unpredictable

creation, and awakens the creatures to a mysterious awareness of God's desire,

which inspires their own lust for life.

Still further, stretching from heaven to the utmost point,

god's yearning embraces the flesh of humanity itself.

Jesus, the word made flesh.

To quo1one John again, we have seen this with our eyes.

We have looked upon him and touched him with our hands.

Here is more than Eros.

Here we have agape.

This is the love that changes everything.

A love so surprising, so contrary to our expectations, that Paul

calls it God's foolishness.

God shows his love agape for us in that while we were yet

sinners, christ died for us.

There it is, while we were yet sinners.

What do you do when enmity has hardened to hatred?

When appeal, argument, reason, persuasion, fails?

When you have reached a dead end.

Then you have only the foolishness of returning

good for evil, of loving the enemy.

God's love takes many forms in the world.

But if it were not for this, while we were yet sinners, it would all come to nothing.

Our hearts would go on hardening to all the calls of beauty and goodness.

We'd swap truth for fake news, and lose ourselves in the smoke of violence.

Lent is almost over.

Not many days left, and yet here is the hardest ask of all.

You must love as God loves.

For the sake of your neighbor, you must return good for evil.

Truth for lies, kindness for cruelty, a blessing for harsh words.

The only way through a dead end.

This is freedom, the freedom of Jesus.

It's not easy.

Even though we have received the gift of God himself, it is not easy.

We are not very good at loving.

The self forgetfulness that Agape asks of us takes my breath away.

Jesus asks that we let down our guard and bear hostility, contempt, loss,

ridicule, even violence, all to offer a moment's radiance of the love that

moves the sun and the other stars.

This is hard.

Instantly I can give you a dozen examples of when demanding forgiveness

or turning the other cheek would compound violence, revictimize the sufferer.

When I think of those, though, I know I am fleeing for refuge to other

people's lives, or beaming myself up into the intellectual stratosphere.

Jesus says to me, I'm not asking about them.

I'm asking you.

Will you learn to put yourself aside and in the face of enmity,

loosen your grip on your interests?

Give up what's due to you?

Return good for evil.

Lent is nearly over.

It is not too late to try though.

Ask Jesus to show you small things that loosen the heart.

Apologizing when you are really in the right, bearing, even cheerfully, with

the daily itch of irritating people.

Not pressing an argument, forgiving someone.

Swallowing a rebuff or an insult in a welcoming response.

Giving a hand to the reliably ungrateful.

Not huge demands, I suppose, they're quite difficult enough.

We might say to ourselves, on this scale, what difference does it really make?

And yet with what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what

parable shall we use for it?

It is like a grain of mustard seed, which when sewn upon the ground is the

smallest of all the seeds on Earth.

Yet when it is sewn, it grows up and becomes the greatest of

all trees, and puts forth large branches so that the birds of the

air can make nests in its shade.