Ephesians 5:25 — Husbands love your wives …

Yesterday I was reminded, as I am from time to time, that today’s young people have been defrauded over the business of love. You know what I mean — all this business of an emotional feeling that some young man or woman is “the one for you” … at least for as long as things go well and nobody more attractive comes along, or even worse the idea that any more committed relationship than a “hookup” has something to do with love.
This fraud has been committed in the name of a Saint Valentine. Do you know his story? Actually, there’s more than one, but the most popular is that he was a Roman Priest at a time when there was an emperor called Claudias who banned the marriage of young people, reckoning that unmarried soldiers fought better, because married soldiers might be afraid of what might happen to their wives or families if they died. At a horribly permissive time (does that sound familiar?) Valentine was in the business of secretly (because of the ban) marrying people in the church. In the end, of course, he got caught and was executed by beating, stoning, and finally having his head chopped off (I guess they wanted to make sure). The last words he wrote were in a note to His jailer’s daughter signed “from your Valentine” … The inspiration for all the nonsense ..
The Bible never talks of today’s kind of “romantic” love. The Song of Solomon certainly talks of passion between the lover and the loved, but there is none of the nonsense of “falling in love” that is at the heart of the modern Valentine’s Day narrative.
I don’t want to get to intellectual about all this, but the best evidence is that the idea of romantic love emerged in the eleventh century as an invention of the balladeers of the crusades. “So what,” you might say, “does the Bible have to say about romantic love?” Nothing. Nothing at all.
The Old Testament has only one word for love, and it carries the sense of strong attraction or affection — but not of romance. There are four Greek words: one meaning sexual love which is not used in the New Testament, one meaning natural affection, one meaning love in families and one — agape? — meaning selfless love. It’s that last one that is the base for Christian marriage. Myra and I were talking about love, and my definition for today was “Love is measured by what you’re prepared to sacrifice for each other — if it’s less than everything, it’s less than love.”
I’ve tried to define love often, and the active, joyful, sacrifice – each for the other – is the closest I’ve come.
The Valentine fiction of romantic love, fake and false though it it is, has at least some idealism — some purity — in it. In the last years though, even that has been eroded by a vicious immorality that means hardly a young couple takes their innocence into marriage — which would be real romance!
The Valentine fraud is getting worse!