What is Love?

There are several words for love in the Greek language.  Two of the most common are philia and agape.

Philia

Philia can be translated as friendship.  It is a love that loves because of something.  There is some type of condition on which this love is based.  A friend is someone who has helped me, and I have helped them.  A friend is someone who shows me how to play a video game, and then grabs the other controller and plays with me, meets me occasionally, and shares common experiences with me.

Agape

Agape on the other hand is a love that does not love becauseof anything but simply loves without any type of condition.  This may seem like a strange concept to us moderns, but when we actually think about it, agape is necessary to human life and flourishing.

Everything philia is, agape is too, but agape has more characteristics than philia and that is where the difference begins.For example, agape is the type of love that considers a person’s potential and who they could be and not simply who they are now.  Agape sees the positives in the midst of all the negatives and works to develop those positives.  Agape is willing to put up with all the chaos of broken people in the hope of that person changing for the better.  Agape often does succeed in transforming people for the better.  Indeed, when the most hopeless of people have transformed for the better beyond what anyone was able to imagine, it is usually due to someone who showed them agape.

Las lágrimas de San Pedro (The Tears of Saint Peter)

 by José de Ribera, 17th Century

Agape, in a way, is the type of love that a good parent has for his or her child.  The child did not have to come to be, yet the parents chose to have the child.  The parents did not have to keep the child, yet they kept the child.  The parents suffer in the first several years of a child’s life.  They certainly do not love cleaning up after the child and waking up in the middle of the night on the child’s cries, but they love the child because they know who the child can become, what their potential is, and they work to see the potential become reality.  This type of agape that a parent shows is a love that gives more to another person than the other person can ever give back.

Agape is also the type of love that an effective teacher has for his or her students. The students can come in with horrible behavioral problems, rotten attitudes, serious personality issues, and in the end the teacher sees them for who they can become even in the midst of all the chaos and the negatives.  They will see the positives in that child and foster them until they overshadow the negatives, and the negatives will disappear because a new pattern of life will take hold in the child due to their education and being able to do the tasks that were formerly impossible to do.

The relationship between these two types of love, philia and agape, is dramatically portrayed at the end of the Gospel of John, although it is not readily apparent to we who read the Bible in translation.

The Ending of the Gospel of John: The Confession of Peter

The Gospel of John ends with a post-Resurrection appearance of our Lord Jesus Christ.  He has already appeared a few times to the Apostles after the Resurrection, and the Apostles seem to have returned to their occupations.

Seven of the Apostles are fishing with the Apostle Peter in the lead.  They go fishing at night because at night the fish would not have seen the boat above them. The whole night they do not catch anything.

In the morning, a man standing on the shore tells them to cast their nets on the right side of the boat, so they do.  At this point there is nothing to lose; maybe they will finally catch something.  They end up catching so many fish that the net fills up.

The Apostles did not know who was telling them this because He was on the shore a little far from them (about 300 feet).  This probably triggered the memory of an earlier instance where our Lord Jesus guided them to such a catch, so the Apostle John says to the Apostle Peter, “It is the Lord.”

Peter dives out of the boat and swims to shore. When the rest of the Apostles arrive, they find our Lord waiting for them on the beach and having made a breakfast of bread and fish.  They present Him with some of the fish from the catch and sit down to breakfast with Him.

Then, our Lord asks Peter something three times if he loves Him.

This is where things get very insightful, but not to us who read the Scriptures only in translation.

The first time Jesus asks the question, he uses the word agape, but Peter answers with philia.

The second time, Jesus asks the same question, and Peter answers the same.

But the third time Jesus changes his own question to use the word philia, but Peter becomes grieved because it is like Jesus is coming down to His level, and almost wondering whether Peter has even that type of love for Him.

Possibly the thought of the denial came up to Peter’s mind.  Our Lord Jesus had even looked Peter in the eyes right after he had denied Him a third time in front of the chiefs of the Jews during the trial.  This added to the suffering of our Lord Jesus because even His closest disciples, His friends had deserted Him.  This friend had even denied being part of our Lord Jesus’s group.  Because of this our Lord was not only alone at His trial, but He also felt all alone.

Peter answers and tells Him, “You know all things. You know I love (philia) you.

Interestingly enough after this, Jesus tells Peter a prophecy about how Peter will die.  The language is similar to the language Jesus used about His own death in the crucifixion. Since the Apostle John had written his Gospel after the death of Peter, he called to mind our Lord’s prophecy about Peter’s crucifixion when writing his Gospel.

The idea behind this prophecy goes back to something Jesus said during His last night with His disciples, and that was “Greater love (agape) had no one than this, that he give his life for his friends” (John 15:13).  Jesus was pointing out that Peter had not gotten to this point yet, but encouraged him that someday he would.  It would even be in the likeness of Jesus’s own death, Peter’s friend.

He ends by telling Peter, “Come, follow Me.” This is exactly the same as what He told Peter the first time He met him.  Our Lord has restored Peter back to the very beginning.

This story is a story of Confession; it might slip the attention of Western readers, but what has just went on here is a confession.

What is Confession?

It is interesting that this is the story that John decides to end with because in a way it is a call to every Christian to follow along.  We know from other Gospels that this is not the last time that Jesus appeared to the Apostles, and John never indicates it was.  Rather, this is where John has chosen to end his Gospel with a view to his audience.  The audience of John’s Gospel were Christians of the late 1^stand early 2^ndgeneration.  They had also been challenged by Gnostic heretics who denied the humanity of Christ. At this point, there were churches all over the Roman Empire, and John was the bishop of several in Asia Minor. He chose to end his Gospel to invite Christians to follow Jesus anew.

We all fall short, and we often do not love Christ with agape, but we need to confess that, repent, and answer His call to get up and follow Him again.  If we let the love of Christ reign in our hearts, then our actions will follow suit, and if they do, then our end will be in agape for Him and for each other.

In the early Church, Christians were most often called “the disciples” or “the brethren.”  The seal of discipleship in the early Church was Confession.  The greatest examples of Christians in the early church had confessors (that is, those whom they confessed to and received guidance from).  For example, Ignatius of Antioch and Polycarp of Smyrna were the disciples of the Apostle John; Irenaeus of Lyons was the disciple of Polycarp of Smyrna.  Augustine of Hippo was the disciple of Ambrose of Milan. Macrina the Elder was the disciple of Gregory Thaumaturgus.  Then her son Basil the Elder learned from her, and in turn he taught his daughter, Macrina the Younger, and Macrina taught her brothers Basil and Gregory.  The examples from early Christianity and indeed until today are too much to count.

This type of spirituality made the earliest Christians strong.  There is not only a continuity with the Sacraments of the Church, but also in the teachings of the church, and both are embodied in individuals we see and deal with, so the flame of the Spirit of Christ continues being passed down across the generations.

If you found benefit from this blog entry, click here to like my Facebook page here OR sign up to my email list to receive my latest blog entries every week in your inboxes, and you will also receive my free eBook The Way of Christ.  Click here to sign up.