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Love Exercise 2

 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. (I Corinthians 13:6)


“What is truth?” retorted Pilate. With this he went out again to the Jews gathered there and said, “I find no basis for a charge against him. (John 18:38)

 

          With the runup to St. Valentine’s day, of course, the subject on Biblegateway.com is love. That’s OK. We need it. And the same exercises you did yesterday with changing “love” to God, to yourself, and to someone else, you can continue here, but it wouldn’t be polite of me to phone in my blog by copying and pasting that, so we get to move on.

          In the I Corinthians verse, we learn that love doesn’t do one thing, but does another. The things it doesn’t and does do are put in juxtaposition. Delighting in evil is the opposite of rejoicing with the truth. Evil rejects truth. Truth rejects evil. But if you ask people about truth, many of them will parrot Pilate. “What is truth?” Truth is in the eye of the beholder. What’s true to or for one person may not be true to or for another.

          But the same person who parrots Pilate (sorry, I like the alliteration) will do what Pilate did – by going out and declaring something to be true or false. “I find no basis for a charge against him.” Truth is relative but “all whites are racist,” and “a person is whatever gender they chose to be,” and “your God is fine for you, but not for me,” etc. Heaven forbid you reject those “truths.” Only “Nazis” and monsters reject those “truths.” The problem is…I identify as your god, which means you must do everything I command and believe everything I tell you for the rest of your life. If I believe that to be true, on what basis can you declare it to be false? How is that actually any different from someone with XY chromosomes is a female because he declares himself to be a female, has an operation and starts taking hormone therapy?      If I believed my self to be the rightful heir to the throne of England – and Queen Elizabeth II a fraud, would that make either of us so? If I believe that a mansion is mine, will the current resident be forced to move out?

          Love rejoices in the truth – not in wish-fulfillment.

 

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