The Duty of Love

I came across an interesting quote by Paul Tillich the other day. It reads "The first duty of love is to listen." Since I found it, I have been considering what it means and what it would look like if we practiced this idea. I see that we often go about our daily interactions with the idea that we have everything figured out. When our friends, family, or co-workers begin to tell us about what is going on in their lives, we often wish they would simply hurry up, let us tell them how to fix their problems, and leave us alone. This stems, partly, from the fact we have so many of our own problems we would like to fix that we do not feel we have time for those of others. This, I believe, is a mistake. As Christians, we are called to live in community with one another; we worship together, pray together, take communion together, and fellowship together. There is no such thing as the solitary Christian. If we do not love each other, life within the body of Christ becomes impossible. The problem with loving each other lies in the reality that each of us enters into the body with all the nasty baggage this life throws on us. We all have different likes, dislikes, sins, struggles, personalities, and ideals.

If we are expected to live together without killing each other, being able to sit down and listen to what the other is saying is imperative. When we lose the ability to try to see things from a perspective other than our own, we cannot expect to live in peace and fellowship. When we become too busy to care about the struggles our fellow Christians are undergoing, we become afflicted with a sort of spiritual leprosy. Someone with leprosy cannot feel pain, and as a result, cannot tell when a member of their body is injured. This eventually can result in the death of the member, and ultimately the person, due to infection. When we cannot feel the pain of our brothers and sisters, we are like the person who cannot tell when he or she has lacerated his arm. The first step to avoiding this is to sit down and listen.

Who better to emulate in this than Christ? Jesus genuinely cared about the people he was with. The woman he met at the well in the Gospel of John, he listened to her and took personal interest in her. This was done in a time when a good Jewish man was not expected to speak to a woman. When Nicodemus came to Jesus in the night, Jesus listened to the pharisee's questions and explained to him the way of the kingdom of God. When sincere seekers came to Jesus, he took them very seriously and poured out the love of the Father on them. We must take this example when we are living our lives among people in the church who do not understand things like we do. We must also live like this in the secular world. We need to sit down with those who do not understand the Kingdom of God and patiently explain to them what we believe. We must also take them and their doubts, questions, and problems seriously. While the temptation is always there to become defensive when questioned, or to try to hurry the conversation along until the person "gets saved," we must remember that Jesus did not become defensive, nor did he try to hurry his way through conversations. Jesus listened to people. Jesus took them seriously. Jesus loved them into the kingdom.

If we are going to love our brothers and sisters in the Lord, we will listen to what they have to say. We cannot simply shut down because the person we are talking to is a "narrow-minded fundamentalist," or a "liberal Christian." That will only cause us to alienate them (Note: there is a time to split away from other Christians due to doctrinal error, but that is an entirely different subject. Splitting should only be a last resort, however). If we listen to them, and they to us, we can have a fruitful discussion that can help us all to see where we might need to change our thinking a bit. One does not win people to the truth by brow-beating them with arguments and polemics, but by listening and correcting in Godly love. This goes for the brothers and sisters with personal problems as well. We must learn to care and to empathize with them in all their struggles. We need to ask ourselves if our brothers and sisters in Christ feel they can share with us. We need to ask ourselves if we are willing to help them when they do, or if we are simply to busy to be Christ to others. "The first duty of love is to listen." Let us fulfill that duty.