COMMENTARY: All you need is love?: 725 words: A photo of Dick Staub is available via www.religionnew

c. 2007 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Being a child of the ’60s, my theology was shaped by those great British theologians, The Beatles, who announced good tidings of great joy: “All you need is love,” followed by “Love, love me do, you know I love you” and “She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah.” But lingering […]

c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Being a child of the ’60s, my theology was shaped by those great British theologians, The Beatles, who announced good tidings of great joy: “All you need is love,” followed by “Love, love me do, you know I love you” and “She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah.”

But lingering beneath the surface of their sunny lyrics was a hint at the darker side of love: “Can’t buy me love, no everybody tells me so.” And Paul McCartney asked the question that is now being answered in his own life. “When I get older losing my hair many years from now … will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64?”


Jesus warned that in the last days the love of most would grow cold.

The Beatles’ love definitely went cold. The band broke up. Their marriages broke up, and McCartney, after losing the love of his life to cancer, remarried, only to find himself alone and losing millions of dollars in a divorce settlement.

Is ours an age where love has grown cold? The evidence is clearest when we look at it in the microcosm of marriage and family.

This week I received an e-mail with the subject line: Why Am I Married?

The first story went like this: “A lady inserted an ad in the classifieds: `Husband Wanted’ and the next day she received a hundred letters that all said the same thing: `You can have mine.”’

Another went like this: “When a woman steals your husband, there is no better revenge than to let her keep him.”

Or this one: “A woman is incomplete until she is married. Then she is finished.”

There is a sad truth beneath the humor. The love of many has grown cold. Promises are made and forgotten; people who said they would stay through better or worse decide to leave instead. During the Christmas season, children who need a stable home are shuttled about in families broken apart because their parents’ love grew cold.

I don’t intend to condemn or to judge, or to ruin what is left of the holidays for people who have already suffered enough because of divorce and abandonment.


I simply want to remind us that what we long for and need is a love that will not let go, a love that that will never give up. We want a love that will not grow cold.

Christmas tells us God loves humans with such a love. Advent sometimes seems anachronistic and sentimental with all its talk of hope, peace, joy and love, when these are the very qualities in shortest supply.

But the love of Christmas is a different kind of love.

Until the New Testament, there were a few common words for love. “Phileo” meant “brotherly love.” “Storge” referred to the everyday courtesies that bind a society together. “Eros” meant romantic love. The Christmas story reveals a new kind of love _ “agape” love _ that transcends all the others. If rediscovered, it could reinvigorate all of them.

One New Testament scholar observed that “agape love” seems to have been virtually a Christian invention _ a new word for a new thing. St. Paul described it this way: “Love is patient, Love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects always trusts always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”

This is the love God shows at Christmas. Its arrival was announced as good news that offers great joy.

In the film “Love Actually,” the narrator (Hugh Grant) comments on the love we witness at the arrival and departure gates of airports and then adds, “When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge; they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that love actually is all around.”


As we end one year and begin the next, it would be good to remember that of all the loves around, the best is God’s agape love that does not give up. It is this love we are called to practice at Christmas and every day of the year.

Turns out The Beatles were right. All you need is love _ agape love.

(Dick Staub is the author of “The Culturally Savvy Christian” and the host of The Kindlings Muse (http://www.thekindlings.com). His blog can be read at http://www.dickstaub.com)

KRE/RB END STAUB

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