Interpretation of Love

Here’s one of the growing number of things that drive me nuts: misinterpreting the Bible.

Alright, it’s not a new annoyance; it’s just increasingly annoying. Not because I am some religious zealot who thinks he has the only bead on scriptural truth, but because the Bible’s continued use as a weapon of societal dysfunction, which itself used to be merely increasingly annoying, has now become dangerous.

When scripture is used to excuse the mass murder of people in nightclubs, to prevent a woman from necessary healthcare, and to enrich an empire instead of demolishing it, a change must come.

Too many Christians, especially in ultra-orthodox and Evangelical churches, misinterpret the Bible — and some clergy know it. Entire denominations subscribe not to the teachings of Jesus but to a religion built in his name by people who never knew him. Those people also transposed a non-Jewish cosmology and an empire’s financial hierarchy onto Jesus’ counter-cultural, anti-empire, “we’re all God’s love” universalism.

But even after 2000 years of fiddling and attempted eradication of unorthodox readings, the Bible still reveals that Jesus was all about inclusive, non-judgmental, freely-given-even-though-we’re-all-wretched love.

Unless we interpret Jesus and his teachings through the lens of unconditional, universal love for all beings without exception, we misinterpret Jesus. And yes, I am well aware of the ancient rabbinic tradition that scripture bears seventy faces — seventy legitimate interpretations. But the great Rabbi Hillel, challenged to summarize the entire Torah while the convert stood on one foot, didn’t list seventy things. He named one: Don’t do to others what is hateful to you. Everything else is commentary.

Jesus also settled this issue. When asked to name the interpretive key to all scripture, he didn’t hesitate to name love.

Matthew 22:35–40 (NIV) One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Jesus is the universe’s expression of perfect love. He is God, the Conscious Universe’s example of what we are fully capable of becoming if we allow ourselves to be filled with and transformed by love — not a mere feeling but a fundamental frequency. The frequency of love.

Jesus is love, and we are love because God is love.

1 John 4:7–8 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.

1 John 4:16 And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.

We are love because God is love and we are made directly from God. This isn’t a claim about what God does. It’s a claim about what God is, the most basic, foundational kind of claim you can make about something. Theologians call that ontological. I just call it the truth.

Islam, Hinduism and others convey similar sentiments.

The Qur’an’s Al-Wadud (الودود) is usually translated as “The Loving” or “The All-Loving” and appears in Surahs 11:90 and 85:14. Importantly, the translation is not “God loves” but a name, a descriptor of God’s essence. God is love. The word itself carries this distinction because Arabic has a separate word for the feeling of love, hubb. Al-Wadud comes from wudd, which is love expressed and enacted, not merely felt.

Even Arabic grammar agrees that love is something you do.

In Bhagavad Gita 10:8, Krishna says, “I am the source of all spiritual and material worlds. Everything emanates from me.” While love isn’t mentioned specifically, the ontological claim is the same. God is the ground of being, not a being who acts. Again, God is love.

Part of my spiritual practice is to recognize that when the same concept appears across many religions, there is probably something worth investigating. As difficult as it is to pin down any spiritual “truth,” when humans receive the same inspiration in different times and places, we do ourselves a disservice by failing to take it seriously.

I think the places where our religions overlap are far more important and interesting than the places they diverge. It’s easy to disagree. Too easy. Our task is to find the spaces where we get along and grow from there.

I see love as a central theme throughout holy texts around the world, so I consider any reading of scripture that produces exclusion, contempt, or permission to harm to be, by definition, a misinterpretation. It contradicts the long-standing claim about love that has been established throughout history and across cultures. And before someone complains that I am seeing what I want to see in scripture, yes, I am looking in the text for love and finding it.

So did Jesus.

Love is the ground of all being. Think of it this way: a reading of any holy text that denies love to anyone is like a physics equation that violates the law of conservation of energy — the math doesn’t add up. It is simply wrong.

Across traditions, we seem to understand that we are made to act and create with love. But for some reason, when it comes to our holy works, we manage to find every possible meaning except love. Or, finding love, we get caught up in irrelevant details.

We need to read scripture as a collection of parables, not a rulebook. Not “what does this text permit” but “what does love demand here, now, for these people?”

The questions we bring to a text determine what we discover. If we bring fear, we find permission to exclude. But if we bring love, we find a demand to include. No, more than a demand. We find an unstoppable desire to include.

Wrong interpretations are more than a nuisance. They start wars over territory and cause psychological and physical harm to millions of outcasts. Reading scripture without love creates a loveless world.

But we do not love en masse because we lack a sense of global human solidarity. I think that misbegotten attitude stems, in part, from poor biblical education and, for most Westerners, a complete lack of education about Eastern religious texts. These failings cause us to misinterpret what love is, especially in relationships with strangers.

We keep love close to our chests, locked away in our hearts, lest letting it out hurt us too deeply. We love our spouses, kids, extended families, and perhaps a friend or two. We keep love small and familiar when it wants to be the biggest thing that’s ever existed, like a sunflower trapped in a pot on a Brooklyn balcony instead of free to grow in an endless field of rich soil.

Love does not want to be contained any more than that sunflower. Or you and I.

Love is everywhere we look if we take the time. The strangers on the subway. Your loud neighbors. The people whose politics make you want to smush a grapefruit in their face.

Our task, as people awakening to the idea that love is a material force, is to tap into that force and let it control our actions, especially in the heat of the moment.

To interpret the Bible correctly, we must first understand love correctly, and that begins by recognizing that love is not merely a feeling but a physical energy, like magnetism or electricity. Love is the creative, connecting force of God. Love is the entire Conscious Universe, the signal, the frequency, the broadcast of reality.

Love is everything, and that is what all the holy scriptures on the planet, from the two books of the Bible, through the Qur’an, the Dhammapada, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching and others, are trying to teach us. Love is the interpretive key required to understand scripture.

We need more love. The theology will follow.

**Question: **Where in your life are you challenged to act with love — and what could change if you brought love to the situation?