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Irrespective of whether you consider Jesus a popular itinerant preacher or the Son of God,
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there’s a very odd thing about his views on love.
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He not only spoke a great deal about love:
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he went on to advocate that we should love some highly surprising people.
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At one point, – described in chapter 7 of Luke’s Gospel – Jesus goes to a dinner party and a local prostitute turns up
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much to the disgust of the hosts.
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But Jesus is friendly and sweet and defends her against everyone else’s criticism.
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In a way that shocks the other guests, he insists that, at heart, she is a very good person.
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There’s another story (in Matthew, chapter 8) where Jesus is approached by a man with leprosy.
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He’s in a disgusting state.
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But Jesus isn’t shocked, reaches out his hand and touches the man.
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Despite the horrendous appearance, here is someone (in Jesus’s eyes) entirely deserving of closeness and kindness.
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In a similar vein, at other times, Jesus conspicuously argues that tax collectors, thieves and adulterers
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are never to be thought of as outside the circle of love.
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Many centuries after his death,
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the foremost medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas defined what Jesus was getting at in this way of talking about love:
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He wrote "the person who truly understands love could love anyone."
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In other words: true love isn’t specific in its target;
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it doesn’t fixate on particular qualities,
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it's open to all of humanity,
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even (and in a way especially) its less appealing examples.
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Today, this can sound like a deeply strange notion of what love is,
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for our background ideas about love tend to be closely tied to a dramatic experience:
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that of falling in love,
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that is, finding one, very specific person immensely attractive, exciting and free of any failings or drawbacks.
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Love is, we feel, a response to an overt perfection of another person.
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Yet – via some admittedly extreme examples – a very important aspect of love is being pushed to the fore in Jesus’ vision.
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And we don’t have to be Christian (that is, we don’t have to believe there’s an afterlife or that Jesus was born to a virgin) to benefit from it.
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At the heart of this kind of love is an effort to see beyond the outwardly unappealing surface of another human
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in search of the tender, interesting, scared and vulnerable person inside.
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What we know as the ‘work’ of love
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is the emotional, imaginative labour that’s required to peer behind an off-putting facade.
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Our minds tend fiercely to resist such a move.
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They follow well worn grooves that feel familiar and justified.
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For instance, if someone hurt us we naturally see them as horrible.
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The thought they might themselves be hurting inside feels weird.
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If a person looks odd, we find it extremely difficult to recognise there might well be many touching things about them deep down.
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If unpleasant events happen in someone’s life
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– if they keep losing their job or acquire a habit of drinking too much or even develop cancer –
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we’re somehow tempted to hold them responsible for their misfortunes.
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It takes a deliberate, taxing effort of the mind to move ourselves off these deeply established responses.
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To do so might mean taking an unappealing-looking person and trying to imagine them as a young a child,
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unselfconsciously playing on their bedroom floor.
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We might try to picture their mother, not long after their birth,
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holding them in her arms, overcome by passionate love for this new little life.
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Or perhaps, drunk and passed out, ignoring their desperate cries.
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We might see a furious person in a restaurant
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violently complaining that the tomato sauce is on the wrong place on their plate
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but rather than condemn and feel superior, we might try to construct a story of how this individual had come to be so impossible,
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and how powerless things feel in a world where something
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(and obviously not what they're ostensibly complaining about)
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has frustrated them to the core.
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The more energy we expend in thinking like this, the more we stand to discover a very surprising truth:
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that we could potentially see the loveable sides of pretty much anyone.
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That doesn’t mean we should give up all criteria when searching for a partner.
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It’s a way of saying that the nicest person will eventually require us to look at them with imagination
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as we try to negotiate around some of their gravely dispiriting sides.
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And, of course, the traffic won’t ever be all just one way.
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We too are deeply challenging to be around
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and therefore stand in need of a constantly imaginative,
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tender gaze to rescue us from being dismissed as merely another everyday monster – or leper.