“Make love” is a great phrase.
I’m really captivated by this simple phrase: make love.
Beyond the childish euphemism to sex, there is a potent mix of fascination and intimacy. We are pulled into each other’s orbits, physically present with someone, and it is in that place love is made.
To be honest, I’ve never liked it as a way of describing sex, because it is somehow dripping with sentimentality while also being so safe and vaguely moralistic.
It plays the frightening truth of naked, carnal exploration into this intellectually sanitized excuse for lust and gratification.
But we are making love!
My cynical youth, spent frightened of my partners, of being hurt by them, of hurting them in turn, left me afraid, not only of sex, but of love’s relationship to sex.
It is almost as if “making love” drove me to separate sex from love.
Making love is the most dangerous of ideas. It is to strip us of not only our carnal obsessions and longings, but from our cold indifference to the other person. To make love with another person is to be intimate and vulnerable. And in our aggressive, Western culture of dominance and power, inviting such vulnerability is an extremely frightening suggestion, and an ultimately dangerous opportunity to change.
Not just sex
I’ve been thinking lately about love. About the love that Jesus asks us to embody and make present in ourselves and in our interactions with other people.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus argues for the making of peace and the making of love present between us. Replacing the cynicism and hate we are taught to appreciate with a love and hope which is extraordinary.
We are taught to reimagine the laws we’ve been taught with a new edge to them. That we don’t retaliate because the law allows us to. We don’t hurt simply because we’ve been hurt and the law allows for you to hurt them back. Replace that impulse instead with respect and love.
Or we have a law that allows us to hurt another person and cause them to be in sin, but how about we recast our relationship to the law so that we don’t cause sin in them?
Or if someone wants to hurt you, your options aren’t to fight back or run away. What if you stand up to them and reveal their abuse to the world? Aren’t you making the world a better place for this love? A more hospitable place for Jesus to be embodied?
With Jesus, we’re told to go and make love in the world. And he isn’t talking about sex. Not euphemistically.
Better Sex, Better Love
We run the risk of obscuring the beauty of the gospel if we try to boil down Jesus to a couple of phrases or when we quote Scripture as if it encapsulates the whole message (John 3:16?).
If I were to name a deep value for Jesus, however, or a theme in his ministry, I would say that he is constantly provoking us toward intimacy. Toward stripping ourselves of our masks and our rituals and the complex human dances we create to not get close to anyone. To lose ourselves for GOD.
In this intimacy, we find fascination and nuance and character. We find the humanness of our bodies and the terrifying prospect of all the bacteria and bugs which live on and within us.
We share from a single cup, not for control, but for a loss of control. Not because we want to get sick, but so that we can let go of our fears.
This is the root of intimacy, isn’t it? The letting go? The taking on the danger of getting hurt?
Through this intimacy, we’re invited to not only be different for Jesus, but for one another. That we might help each other. That we might love each other.
Intimacy makes us better lovers. Better Christians. Better lovers of GOD.
And according to Jesus’s teaching, we show our love to GOD by how we love each other. Intimately. Dangerously. With openness to getting hurt. All of it.
Making love isn’t about sex. Making love is our jobs.
And for many of us, sex is just one expression of something much more profound. Love isn’t really found. It’s made.
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