Big Questions: How Does My Interpretation Expand Love?

As we continue asking the Big Questions that can help us better understand, interpret, and apply the Scriptures, today we find ourselves in the midst of the last step: Expand. After doing the introductory work of the Experience and Encounter steps and the heavy lifting of the Explore and Challenge steps, we evaluate our emerging interpretation with a few final questions to ensure it will help us to grow in faith, hope, and love. Yesterday’s post framed this in terms of personal growth. Today’s frames it in terms of love, which is, of course, of the three virtues mentioned above, “the greatest” (1 Corinthians 13:13).

In the past, I’ve asked this question with the more jargony, “How does it help to expand my circle of empathy?” This more specific wording comes from Integral thought and how it understands the drivers of cognitive and cultural evolution (remembering that evolution is not about getting ‘better and better’ so that one species is ‘more evolved’ than another, but about becoming better adapted to one’s environment). It posits that we grow by expanding our awareness and empathy: As infants we are only aware of ourselves, then begin gain awareness of our families. At some point, empathy — being able to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes and understand their beliefs and feelings — joins awareness. And, gradually. that circle of awareness and empathy grows to include those in our communities, those in our country or cultural group, and ideally, everyone in the world. And at every step of the way, this changes how we think, as more perspectives, and more diverse perspectives, are added. I think there’s something to this way of thinking, and think we can see it in our Scriptures, from the evolution of ideas about God (from ‘God cares about Abraham and his family’ to ‘God cares about the nation of Israel’ to ‘God cares about everyone in the world’), and in Jesus’ teaching and example. But what that wording gains in specificity, it loses in simplicity and clarity, and while I think it is in harmony with the Scriptures, it lacks an obvious connection to how they talk about life. And so, for the remainder of this post, I’ll talk simply about love — and specifically, loving your neighbour as yourself. It amounts to much the same thing.

This question is helpful for us in much the same way as yesterday’s. If we want our Scripture reading to be meaningful, it will help us on our journey to becoming like Christ. And a big part of that is love, not just in terms of a cozy feeling about someone, but lived out in practical ways of grace, empathy, and mercy. And not just for those closest to us, but to our neighbour — whom Jesus defines as the person we’d least want it to be — and even our ‘enemy’. If we leave a piece of Scripture feeling less empathy and love for anyone, then we know we’ve gone off track and it’s time to regroup.

Let’s look at a few examples from some of the passages I’ve studied here over the years:

For the troubling story of Jehu’s rebellion, when I evaluated my emerging reading — that Jehu represents a kind of anti-Christ figure, who took the same zeal for God that Jesus would later have but apply it in a misguided and ungodly way — I came up with the following:

The reading of the text uncovered here expands our circle of empathy by refusing to ignore the victims of Jehu’s actions. It acknowledges that even if as Scripture we need to find ways to apply stories like this to our lives, we have a responsibility to wrestle with the ways they fall short of the Kingdom of God as much as the ways they reveal it. It brings into awareness a reminder that violence begets violence; that even well-intentioned revolutions can quickly descend into reigns of terror; and that having too high an understanding of one’s own purpose often leads to a tunnel vision that dehumanizes others and justifies almost any action. We have to be wary of anyone who thinks they are the answer.

My study of Hebrews 10, which is a lengthy comparison of Jesus’ sacrificial death and the work of the high priest on the Day of Atonement, revealed that as the fulfillment of this ritual, Jesus’ offering up of his life (symbolized by his blood) cleanses us, as the life-force/blood of the goat cleansed the Holy of Holies in the Temple, granting us access to the presence of God. When I put that interpretation through the filter of today’s question, I concluded:

It can be said to ‘transcend and include’ because it does not reject the stirring language of sacrifice even as it insists that language only points to a bigger and more important whole. It increases awareness by not resting on established cultural assumptions about the nature of sacrifice. And, it expands our circle of empathy by insisting, with Jesus, that purity does not mean rejecting or marginalizing others, but including and welcoming everyone.

Finally, I’ll point to a post from my series on Ephesians focused on a passage where Christ is said to bring peace and unity between Jewish and Gentile believers. After wrestling with issues of cultural assimilation — the great fear of the early Jewish Christians about welcoming in Gentiles that did in fact come to pass — I concluded in this section:

What we have here is a radical reappraisal of human identity and religious privilege. The old barriers, here imagined in terms of the Jew-Gentile division, but also including barriers of sex and gender, political status, and by extension any barriers we set up between us, are torn down, not to assimilate one group into another, but to extend the privileges of ‘insiders’ to everyone. This expands our awareness and circle of empathy, as we understand more and more people as being within the community of the faithful. It sees no one and nothing as being inherently outside the purview of God’s love and grace, and in so doing promotes the good fruit of love, joy, peace, and so on.

In all three of these, I think we see the power of this question. It doesn’t allow us to sit comfortably and unchanged, but demands that we keep the transformation of our hearts that the Gospel demands front and centre, so that we leave the text encouraged and motivated to better love God, neighbour, and the world.

In the next post, I’ll turn to the last question in this Expand step, which — predictably enough for me — asks us about the quality of the fruit our interpretation promotes.