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Works of Love VIII: Loving the Unlovable

[From Part I Chapter IV, "Our Duty to Love the People We See"]

If anyone says, “I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. (1 John 4:20 ESV)

In this chapter Kierkegaard sets up a familiar scenario:


“Usually one thinks that when a man has changed essentially for the worse, he is changed in such a way that one is exempted from loving him.” [1]
We have all experienced these situations, in which a person we once loved has become unlovable. Maybe their personality changed, maybe they made a poor choice, maybe they did something hurtful. For whatever reason a person went from being lovable to unlovable, and in those cases we find ourselves not really wanting to love them. The world gives us full permission to stop loving—because world doesn’t have the command of God, “you shall love”—and in fact often blames anyone who continues to love a person who has been judged unlovable. Even some Christians leaders will say that we should feel free to cut people out of our lives when they behave a certain way (an example of which I’ve previously discussed here). However, by chapter eight it should come as no surprise to us that Kierkegaard disagrees He writes,

“What a confusion of language: to be exempt—from loving—as if it were a matter of compulsion, a burden one wished to cast away! But Christianity asks, ‘because of this change, can you no longer see him?’ The answer to that must be, ‘Certainly I can see him. As a matter of fact, I see he is no longer worth loving.’ But if you can see this, you really do not see him (which in another sense you cannot deny doing); you merely see unworthiness, imperfection, and admit thereby that when you loved him you in another sense did not see him but saw only his excellence and perfections, which you loved. But Christianly understood, loving is loving the very person one sees. The emphasis is not on loving the perfections one sees in a person, but on loving the person one sees, whether or not one sees perfections or imperfections in this person, yes, how distressingly he has changed, inasmuch as he certainly has not ceased to be the same man. He who loves the perfections he sees in a person does not see the person and therefore ceases to love when the perfections cease, when change comes in, which change, not even the most distressing, nevertheless does not mean that the person ceases to be…. Christian love grants the beloved all his imperfections and weaknesses and in all his changes remains with him, loving the person it sees.”[2]
God loves us, not because of anything we’ve done, but because we are his children. In the same way we are called to love our neighbors, not because of what they’ve done, but because they are our neighbors. If we stop loving someone because they became unlovable, then we never really loved that person to begin with—we loved the fact that they were lovable. If you love a person simply because they are your neighbor, a fellow child of God, then nothing they do can change that fact. No matter how unlovable they become they are still just as much a neighbor and a child of God, and so our love for them ought not to change. Just as Jesus loved Peter in the midst of his denial, so we ought to love people who are unlovable. As Kierkegaard puts it,
“If, then, you will become perfect in love, strive to fulfill this duty, in loving to love the person one sees, to love him just as you see him with all his imperfections and weaknesses, love him as you see him when he is utterly changed, when he no longer loves you, when he perhaps turns indifferent away or turns to love someone else, love him as you see him when he betrays and denies you.”[3]
Dear Father,
You love me because I am your child, not because I am perfect or lovable. After all, I am neither. Thank you for that love. Grant me to love like you do, to see past deeds and imperfections to the child of God beneath, and to love all of your children, especially when it is hard to love.
In the name of Jesus Christ,
Amen



[1] Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love. Harper Perennial, 2009, p. 169.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid. 170.
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