Love is NOT Jealous

Love is Not Jealous 愛是不嫉妒

Jealousy is ...
- the fear of losing someone
- the pain of being left out of the loved one's life
- a feeling of pain at losing touch with someone we love because he/she has been stolen away by someone else.

Lovers are jealous
Lovers are jealous because erotic love is born of need. Erotic love demands total possession, exclusive rights to another person., moves us toward complete fulfilment in another person. However, individuals need separation and independence from lovers as much as they need union with them. So, eros is always accompanied by some jealousy. Jealousy is felt in all forms of erotic love: romantic love, friendship, sibling's rivalry for parent's love, etc.

Agapic love is not jealous.: not a seekiing, grasping, holding love, but a giving love, a love that lets go. It is not the love of need, but the love of power. It is the power to move us toward another person with no expectation of reward -- not even the reward of exclusive loving.

Jealousy hurts.
Jealousy is the pain we feel when our role, our position, is threatened by someone close to us. Envy can stimulate us to try harder. Jealousy stimulates us only to resentment of the person who does better. Eg we envy our teacher's knowledge, we are jealous of our classmates who got straight As when we get Cs.

God is jealous
But jealousy is not in itself a sin. God is a model of jealousy. "I the Lord they God am a jealous God" God wants to be what he is, the only God of all the creation. He cannot shares his people with false gods, fabricated illusions. But he will share his people with other people. God feels no pain when we share our love for him with a fellow human. God is also not jealous when men and women give themselves to each other. He created us to give ourselves, heart and body, to others besides himself; and he is glad.

God's love moves Him to let others be themselves. God wanted the world to be, to be beautiful and powerful in its own way. He did not need to create a photocopy of himself like Narcissus. He allowed them to be themselves, like God and yet very different from him. God does not monopolize existence.

Agape transcends jealousy without destroying it
Love is the inner power to be happy when someone else shares your friend; to rejoice in the superior talent, or power of someone close to you. Indeed, love is the power to be glad when another person shares a part of your loved one's life that you cannot share.

Love as the power to share persons originates in a God who could give his Son to win many and who would love each other. Such love knows that sharing a friend is not losing one but only making the circle a little larger.

To be loved with this love and to share its power is to overcome fear -- even the fear of loss, even the fear of being left out. This love enablese us to transcend jealousy.It overcomes fear as it overcomes self-pity, the insecurity and suspeicion of erotic love --> the power of sharing without being threatened.

Where agape enables us, we will rise above jealousy, but we will not eliminate it. God knows that we must live by erotic love: to follow the longings of our soul & body for something beyond ourselves to satisfy this need. We will be jealous in this finite, sinful life as long as we love erotically. As long as we love with both eros and agape, we will live in creatiave tension with jealousy.

From this tension creative compromises can come.
Within marriage eros demands exclusive sexual love; this demand rises fromthe heart of marriage. Every spouse has the right ot jealousy when the hearat of marriage is being threatened. Agape refelcts boundaries and limits in life. But where the partnership is not in fact threatened, Christian love of agape is the power to share a husabnd or wife with another.

Jealousy becomes the more cruel the more intese are the the expectations of eros and the threats to its fulfilment. If we have nothing else in the world to live for but our lover, we are vulnerable to the worst fits of jealousy.

Agapic love is the power to diminish the pain of jealousy because it keeps us from expecting too much from another finite person, not give our souls to idols, idol of ideal person. Agape keeps eros from expecting everything in this life. It further diminishes the pain of jealousy because the power to share, we also learn to be thankful that someone else can discover and to add on what you lack in meeting all the needs of your loved one..

Agape is the power one can transcend without eliminating the pain of jealousy. Let jealousy be a tinge of hurt that reminds us how much we still love and care, be an exciting revelation to the other person that he or she is loved enough to cause pain; let it be a warning system that protects a marriage by reminding us that we love within limits. But the power of agapic giving and sharing will prevent jealousy from building fences of self-protection against any sharing of love and loved ones.

Agape is the power of sharing, ie, love is not jealous.


撮要自 已故牧師Rev. LB. Smedes之「愛在限制中: 在自私的世界中實踐無私的愛Love within limits: realizing selfless love in a selfish world. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1979. 」 Rev. Smedes was a retired minister in the Christian Reformed Church, a former ethics professor at Fuller Theological Seminary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_B._Smedes