Love does not enable abuse
There is a huge gulf between being "nice" and genuine love
I am slowly learning that there is a huge difference between being ‘nice’ and genuine love. It involves unlearning a lot of what I thought I knew: when I was younger, I used to read the passages in the Bible about loving your neighbour and think that what we needed to do was try really, really hard to be nice. In my mind, ‘love’ had become the same thing as being nice to people - even if they were mean to you.
Let me give you an example. For a period of time (about ten years ago) there was an atheist who would regularly comment on my blog and disagree with me. With the benefit of hindsight, I think he was commenting not because he wanted to engage with me in good faith, but because he wanted to demonstrate his own intellectual superiority. Sadly the internet is full of this kind of thing - people throwing words at each other to demonstrate they are right, without any real attempt to engage. This cartoon from XKCD really hits the nail on the head:
At the time, however, I didn’t really see this. I thought that, as a Christian, I needed to be nice to him. I used to say things like “you’re always welcome here” - even if I felt that he wasn’t really engaging, or being insulting and rude. I thought that this was simply what Christians were supposed to do. After all, we’re supposed to “turn the other cheek” and love our enemies. We’re supposed to overcome evil with good. I thought that was exactly what I was doing!
I like to think I’ve gained wisdom since then, and I can see now where I went wrong. I had confused being ‘nice’ with love. It’s an easy mistake to make, but it’s a mistake that carries serious consequences.
That’s why I want to share what I’ve learned here: I think many people today are making the same mistake. Although someone being rude in a blog comment is a trivial matter in the big scheme of things, I have come to understand how getting ‘nice’ confused with love impacts in some very important areas of life.
Let’s start by thinking about how love is different to ‘nice’.
A thin line between love and nice…?
In Jane Austen’s masterpiece Pride and Prejudice, there’s a moment where Elizabeth and Jane are having a conversation about Mr Darcy and Mr Wickham. Elizabeth Bennett is usually a good judge of character, but she has come to understand that she has badly misjudged both Wickham and Darcy: she initially thought that Wickham was a good man and Darcy not, but she has come to understand the very opposite is true instead. How did she come to be so wrong? She says:
One has got all the goodness, and the other all the appearance of it.
Mr Wickham, despite not being a good man, has all the appearance of goodness - unlike poor Mr Darcy. Wickham was nice to other people on a superficial level, but when it came to the crunch he was only concerned about himself. Darcy, on the other hand, appeared to be cold-hearted and proud - but turned out to be a man of immense good character when he needed to be.
The point I am making here is that we need to look beyond the superficial to see the difference between ‘love’ and ‘nice’. There’s a world of difference between them - they are like night and day. However, on the surface it might be easy to mistake one for the other.
So, what does ‘nice’ look like?
Not rocking the boat - going out of your way to avoid upsetting people and trying to be pleasant to everybody. Maybe even turning a blind eye to wrongdoing.
Never saying anything negative about anyone or anything - even people you don’t like. This might involve pretending to like people you don’t like or even who treat you badly.
Never seriously rebuking someone for doing something wrong - even if it hurts you. (Perhaps especially if it hurts you).
In short, someone who is ‘nice’ will never have a bad word to say about anybody, will avoid controversial topics like the plague, and will say nothing when they are treated badly. Nice people are easy to get along with, at least on a superficial level.
Loving people, on the other hand, are very different. People who love:
Are not able to let some things go when it concerns a matter of principle. They believe that things such as truth, honesty, beauty, integrity, righteousness and the like are important enough to ‘make a fuss’ about. They want to put God first, and that means putting his ways first.
They cannot simply brush wrongdoing under the carpet. Sin is a serious business. If someone has done wrong, it should be dealt with appropriately.
They cannot overlook when wrong has been done to them - it should be dealt with and put right before reconciliation. Love would rather bring healing - even at great personal cost - than pretending that things were OK without proper reconciliation.
These are the hallmarks of love. I hope it is clear to see how someone who is genuinely loving could be perceived as being not very ‘nice.’ That’s why, throughout the Bible, the prophets were always on the margins and even persecuted - people thought they were ‘rocking the boat’, when they were simply trying to obey God.
God is love
Ultimately, those who love are simply being like their Creator: as the apostle John put it, “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them” (1 John 4:16). Saying “God is love” is not a ‘nice’ thing to say. “God is love” is an awesome thing (‘awesome’ in the traditional sense of the word!) and we should do so with fear and trembling.
One of the people who grasped the deep significance of what it meant to say “God is love” was C.S. Lewis. I apologise here that I pretty much always quote Lewis - but he had a lot of good things to say! This is an extract from his book The Problem of Pain:
When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God loves man: not that He has some ‘disinterested’ … concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the ‘lord of terrible aspect’, is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist’s love for his work and despotic as a man’s love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator’s eyes. It is certainly a burden of glory not only beyond our deserts but also, except in rare moments of grace, beyond our desiring…
This passage is one of the most sublime things I’ve ever read about God’s love. God’s love, says Lewis, is not something that is content with wanting us to be happy as we define it: God’s love desires us to be holy - and it is only when we are holy that we will be truly happy. We are content to potter around the foothills of joy and happiness, ignoring the infinite joy that is offered to us if we climb the mountain of holiness and seek the Lord. God loves us so much that he wants more for us than we desire for ourselves: in love, he wants us to go through the pain of growing in holiness so that we might share in his righteousness and joy. As it says in Hebrews: “No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it” (Hebrews 12:11).
Many people today have a romantic view of love, a sort of mush ‘happily ever after’ kind of view. In this world, love demands nothing of us and simply gives us what we want. But real love is disruptive, real love is awkward, real love grabs us and won’t let us go. Real love can’t paper over the cracks in the world and the cracks in relationships, but wants them to be healed through the blood of Jesus. This is the kind of love we learn from God. As John said a few verses later in his letter, “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).
I hope by this point it will be clear that love is something far beyond ‘nice’. Let’s move on to think about a few ways today where we are in danger of confusing love and ‘nice’.
Where we confuse love and ‘nice’ today
I think there are two ways we see the confusion between love and ‘nice’ today: on an individual level for us as people, but also on a corporate / institutional level.
On an individual level, I hope that the implications of what I’ve said are clear. I started out with my example of the blog commenter, but for many people it is much more serious. For example, many women in the past have been taught that the Bible asks them to stay in abusive marriages. This is wrong: it is not loving to an abuser to allow them to continue their abuse. To love them would be to confront them, in the hope of their ultimate repentance.
One of the things that I’ve found most striking about Jesus lately is how he never allowed himself to be abused. He wasn’t ‘nice’ to the Pharisees, but he spoke the truth to them plainly. When he was forced to submit to mistreatment, he pointed out when it was wrong (e.g. John 18:23). He even submitted himself to the cross voluntarily - he laid down his own life (John 10:18). He pointed out to Pilate that he would have no authority unless it came from above (John 19:11).
The point here is that Jesus was not a ‘doormat’: Jesus didn’t allow himself to be trampled all over. He never allowed himself to be used or abused. I think the church needs to think these things through more carefully if we are to make headway with safeguarding. There’s much more that could be said about this, but I’d like to move on to think about how we can mistake love with ‘nice’ on a corporate level.
There are many places in society where this is happening at the moment:
Schools. Last year, my wife worked as a teaching assistant at a local school, and it seemed to embody everything that is wrong in education at the moment when it comes to discipline. Children were basically not disciplined - if they did something wrong, they were given a gentle rap on the knuckles but that was about it. They knew they could do whatever they liked, and there would be no real comeback. As you might expect, the children pretty much ran riot in the school. The reason given was that most of the children came from the rough part of town - they couldn’t be expected to behave, you see. The ‘progressive’ view of education is to try be understanding of children, which seemed to mean in practice allowing them to behave however they like.
There are many problems with this approach. For one, allowing children with difficult backgrounds to behave badly - simply because they are from difficult backgrounds - is actually not treating those children with love. God doesn’t relax his standards just because of our background, and neither should we. If we truly love people, we should hold everyone to the same standards. Another problem is that allowing difficult children to behave however they liked impacted negatively on the other children. My wife, for example, had to spend a large part of her time running around after one or two children - when she could have been spending the time helping children who actually wanted to learn. Being ‘nice’ to the difficult children actually meant not loving other children.
This leads me onto the second example: Refugees and asylum seekers. After the recent riots, there were various ‘anti-racist’ demonstrations with people holding up ‘Refugees Welcome’ placards. We should be nice to refugees!
There are, again, several problems with this. For example - why did the ‘asylum seekers’ crossing over to the UK from France on dinghies not claim asylum in the first safe country they arrived in? Why did they come to the UK? Could it be, maybe, that they are trying to take advantage of us? And, if they are trying to take advantage and get something for nothing, isn’t it wrong to simply give it to them? Are there not better solutions to this problem?
Additionally, the people saying “refugees welcome” are not actually saying they are going to welcome refugees into their own homes. What they are really saying is, they want the government to use taxpayers money (i.e., other people’s money) to pay for more places to house refugees - a bill which is running to about £8 million per day at the moment. Should not everyone who pays have a say in how their money is spent? If I was walking down the high street with a friend and we passed a homeless person, it would be cheeky of me to say: “I feel compassion for that homeless person - give them all your money.” If I am the one who feels love and compassion, I should be the one to do something!
This is another where you could go on and on, so I’ll leave it there - but I hope that it will help you to think about and recognise what’s happening for yourself.
In conclusion
It seems to me that we are suffering from an epidemic of ‘nice’ lately. I think it’s at the heart of our problems: ‘nice’ might look good - it certainly plays well to the crowd - but I think that ‘nice’ can be worse than downright hostility. By contrast, love is the only thing which has the power to confront our problems and do something about them.
I hope that what I have written will help you to recognise the difference between love and ‘nice’. Please do comment below with any examples you can think of where you’ve seen the difference.