Agapé and the Parable of the Good Samaritan

To try getting an understanding about translating the Gospels, I’m reading 2 books about translations. The first is one of those that try to reconstruct the Aramaic Gospels, the other one is about translating directly from Greek without taking into account any church doctrine that developed after the first century. That’s how I was able to see a deeper meaning to the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

Here is the English translation of that passage in Luke 10:25-37, but with the Greek ‘agapé’ left untranslated. I did that because I think the Greek followers of St. Paul would have understood the deeper, spiritual understanding of Jesus’ encounter with the lawyer. 

“A lawyer stood up to test Jesus. ‘Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ He said to him, ‘What is written in the law? What do you read there?’ He answered, ‘You shall have agapé for the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.’ And he said to him, ‘You have given the right answer; do this and you will live.’ But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’ Jesus replied, ‘A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him, he passed on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him, and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, “Take care of him, and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.” Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ He said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’” (Luke 10:25-37 New Revised Standard Version)

I think that Jesus told that shocking parable honoring the hated Samaritan as the way to shake up the lawyer and prove to him that he had asked the wrong question. But for thousands of years people have been making the same mistake — thinking that was the question that should be asked. So that very same mistake (sin?) has continued to be asked because of the lack of awareness of why Jesus told the Parable of the Good Samaritan and then turned the question around. So why did he?

The point is the 2 Great Commandments have nothing to do with who the neighbor is or what ‘neighbor’ even refers to. The point has to be with agapé. “Go and do likewise” refers to the spiritual power of agapé — and the importance of using the power of agapé.

As I found out when I researched in the Greek Septuagint for the blog post back in March about the Great Shema, the key word that the 2 commandments have in common is agapé. That happens because the second commandment made the radical jump of proposing that people relate to one another the same spiritually as relating to God.

For centuries people have argued that it was humanly impossible to do that. My answer to that argument is “so don’t try doing it humanly.” The conclusion I came up with is to realize that agapé is spiritual power. As we have recorded for us in Romans 5:5, our hope is that “God’s agapé has been poured into our hearts.” I think that’s our hope because we are able to use the spiritual power of agapé to relate to one another as we relate to God.  So as Jesus told the lawyer, “Go and do likewise.”

Confusing Agapé with a ‘Different Kind of Love’

Recently I ran across a book that illustrates the struggle that happens in mental and emotional constructs when trying to come up with the spiritual meaning of love. The author of that book, Love 2.0, is the relationship scientist, Barbara Fredrickson. In her book she tries to come up with a new science of love.

Of course, the solution to that unnecessary struggle is to recognize agapé. Although Fredrickson tries to come to terms with spirituality, she insists on a scientific approach to all aspects of love. So she doesn’t consider the Greek version of Christian scriptures. Even though the Greek word for the spiritual power emanating from the heart-center is agapé, and it worked its way into modern usage beginning in the early 1900’s, she tries to stick with the inadequate English language. 

That’s partly what’s behind the major mistake in biblical translation after the 1800s when ‘agapé’ was translated into English as ‘love.’ For example in this blog’s posting that is below this posting I talk about the false impression that chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians was merely advice about relationships. So we get a completely different understanding by interpreting the verses from the viewpoint of spiritual development.

To illustrate the improvement that her book could have taken, I went through her book and in the places where deeper inspiration can be found by recognizing agapé, I changed the following quotes to use agapé.

“Agapé can give you a palpable sense of oneness and connection, a transcendence that makes you feel part of something far larger than yourself.

Agapé is life-giving, an indispensable source of energy, sustenance, and health.

Agapé lifts you toward the higher spiritual altitudes of oceanic oneness. And from these new and higher vantage points, you can better see and appreciate your connections to the larger fabric of life as well as your place and influence within it. Agape is also deeply personal. It unfurls within and throughout your mind and body like a wave.

When you experience agapé, you not only become better able to see the larger tapestry of life and better able to breathe life into the connections that matter to you, but you also set yourself on a pathway that leads to more health, happiness, and wisdom.

Agapé ripples out through space and time. In a moment of agapé flow, your awareness automatically expands, allowing you to appreciate more than you typically do. Over time, these powerful moments change who you are. They help expand your network of relationships and grow your resilience, wisdom, and physical health. This repeated back-and-forth sharing helps establish and strengthen healthy communities and cultures. 

Agapé can affect you so deeply that it reshapes you from the inside out and by doing so alters your destiny for loving moments.

When you make agapé your prevailing desire, you remake whole domains of your life. You become appreciably and enduringly different, and better. You uplift others, helping them become different and better as well.

Learn to seek agapé out more frequently and it can elevate you, your community, and our world far beyond what you and I can today envision. Opportunities for agapé sharing abound. The more you experience agapé, the more you open up and grow, becoming wiser and more attuned, more resilient and effective, happier and healthier.”

Interpreting Scripture from Agapé Awareness

One of the problems with the way blogs are constructed comes from trying to develop a progression of thinking from page to page. The problem is blogs are organized in reverse order. So when someone would stumble onto this blog, this top page is the last of 10 years worth of pages, with the comments here resulting from 10 years of research and reasoning.

That means this page may not make much sense unless you’ve read the 142 pages that have come below it. But anyway, now I’ll use the 10 years when I have experienced the development of Agapé Awareness to reinterpret the 13th chapter of 1 Corinthians. Finally I reached the conclusion that this chapter is about the spiritual power of agapé.

Slowly I came to realize that a major mistake was made in biblical translation in the 1800s when ‘agapé’ first started being translated into English as ‘love.’ That gave the impression that chapter 13 was merely advice about relationships. But that misses the meaning of the chapter. Instead, we should interpret the verses from the viewpoint of spiritual development. That’s why the author started by talking about spiritual gifts. So the point of those introductory verses was to show that agapé is not only the most important spiritual gift but all other spiritual gifts amount to nothing without agapé.

From that viewpoint, we need to see the rest of the verses as explaining how the spiritual power of agapé works. That leads me to think that this chapter is a summary of a training manual for working with agapé in the process of spiritual development. So now I’ll imagine how it could be a training manual. 

First, each Greek word would be read from spiritual awareness. The first word describing how agapé works is ‘makrothymeo,’ which viewed spiritually is the ability to remain tranquil while accepting all things that happen as merely things that happen, without getting upset by what happens, without having expectations about the time that is involved.

The second Greek word, “chresteuomai,” appears only in this place in all scripture. So it is not the common word for kindness. Viewed spiritually it expresses the power of openness to others to share the flow from the heart-center. We can think of agapé as like a seed planted in our heart-center, and as it grows up into our surface, it gives life to our actions. So trainees would need to work with agapé in a way that at the same time it opens them up spiritually it draws them into divine Presence.

Second, the middle verses show what agapé helps to overcome. Taken together those negative images show what can be overcome by this different kind of spiritual power that flows through human relationships. So trainees must learn to disassociate themselves from ego-centric pressures. Trainees must learn to have agapé help overcome ego-identity. That’s how they learn to live by trust instead of living from fear and defensiveness.

Then they learn to work with the power of agapé — giving of themselves in helping others and in working for justice — that way it gives the energy to keep from getting burned out. Agapé flow is continuous and does not depend on us or on others but gives the power to deal with all beings equally. It is the power of openness to and acceptance of others.

The following six verses demonstrate the power of agapé to strengthen the spiritual development of people. And the verse about hoping all things reminds us of Romans 5:5 that says we are sustained by hope “because God’s agapé has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” So trainees learn to let God’s agapé flow through their heart-centers into power for their living.

Agapé and Spiritual Development

In the blog page that follows this I returned to study First Corinthians 13. So now I want to reflect on what that means for the full spiritual development of the human race. 

That means I don’t think of St. Paul as confined to merely the little groups (that we today call ‘churches’) who responded to his message and gathered together. I think he meant for his message to be universal, extending far beyond those gathering groups. For as St. Paul started the very next chapter by advising: “Put agapé first.” (New English Bible translation, with ‘agapé’ left in its original Greek) Both chapters are mainly about agapé.

As he explained in the middle section of Chapter 13, agapé can help all people move beyond any ego-centric behavior. He seems to be saying that agapé is our very witness that true spiritual power is on the side of patience, kindness, justice and truth -- and that it is against envy, conceit, self-righteousness, and judgmental attitude and action — in other words against all other results of ego-centric behavior. 

Then he concluded that we need agapé to become fully mature in our spiritual development; otherwise, we remain childishly stunted in our growth in faith. And finally, even though we know that faith, hope, and agapé abide to sustain us spiritually -- “the greatest of these is agapé.” (vs. 13) Greater than faith and hope?!

St. Paul was telling his generation, and all generations since then, to expect that when we open ourselves to the power of agapé flowing from deep within us, we will find it to be patient, kind, non-judgmental, and not ego-boosting. I take that to mean that God will not force us to open to the flow of agapé, so each of has to be completely willing to open up then use what comes from our spiritual-heart-center -- but also that agapé will eternally be there for us. Even though agapé is the most important power that God has for us, we have to freely accept the gift or else it will mean nothing to us -- and the deep purpose of our lives will not fully develop for us until we are willing to work with that all-important spiritual power.

Later on, near the end of that epistle, St. Paul said, “Stay awake, stand firm in your faith, be brave, be strong. Everything should be done in agapé.” (16:13-14 Common English Bible) That’s how he thought of the total influence of agapé -- that we should use it to do everything that brings ultimate meaning to Life.

It is that spiritual power that brings from the center of our being the peace that is the spiritual basis of patience itself; the spiritual strength of kindness; the wise rejoicing in the truth; and the basis of such a profound compassion that “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

The Importance of Agapé

During the 10 years that I’ve been keeping this blog, I’ve posted before about the NT book’s chapter First Corinthians 13. The original Greek is central to understanding why agapé was so important to the first Christians. St. Paul used those verses to explain to his Greek readers why he started using the word ‘agapé’ and why he thought it pointed to something so powerful for everyone. (So of course, we must remember he was writing about agapé.)

Now, in summarizing my study of 1 Cor. 13, I’m keeping in mind the important point he eventually made in his letter to the Romans. There he talked about the spiritual power of divine agapé having been poured into human hearts by the Holy Spirit. So I was able to interpret St. Paul’s description of agapé in terms of its spiritual power.

When St. Paul started showing the power of agapé, his first readers would have been surprised. Over the years, my work with agapé power has led me to even deeper insights into the radical message that he gave there. I’ve come to understand more profoundly why he warned his readers that what he was going to show them was unusual by saying, “Now I shall show you a still more excellent way.” So what was this innovation that he brought to the early development of Christianity?

What we call the 13th chapter began by continuing his list of spiritual gifts that he started talking about in chapter 12. He did that to show that he considered agapé to be the greatest of all spiritual gifts. In Galatians, Paul called it the fruit of the Spirit. He was pointing out how that deep spiritual sense allows us to accept other people in a life-affirming way that we become neither agitated with them nor attach any degree of importance to anything they may to do us.

For example, agapé was so important to deep spiritual awareness that any attempt to gain divine inspiration without using the power of agapé would amount to nothing. When he got into what we today mean by charity, he said that if we give away all our possessions and even are willing to sacrifice our own bodies for the cause -- but don’t do it through the power of agapé -- we gain nothing. At that point he had his readers’ attention in a shocking way with that list of comparisons between agapé and all the other spiritual gifts that most people would find wonderful to have. So he was ready to lay out the details showing what agapé power could do. 

His readers would have understood that whatever that strange spiritual power is, patience and kindness are of the very essence of what it is. He seems to be saying this: the way that spiritual power works in a person and between persons in a faith community, agapé is patient and kind. What does that mean?

He summarized that meaning by saying that agapé “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” What an amazing spiritual power! He was pointing out that agapé power helps us not be envious or boastful or arrogant or rude or insist on our own way, and not be irritable or resentful. Then he hit the self-righteous religious people right between the eyes when he said that agapé will help them not rejoice in the wrongdoing of those they like to judge as less religiously worthy. Because everyone knows how difficult it is to live that way, we are able to see how extremely important it is for agapé power to bring about an inner transformation.

So we need agapé to become fully mature in our spiritual development; otherwise, we remain childish in our understanding of the spiritual dimension of Life. And finally, even though we know that faith, hope, and agapé abide to sustain us spiritually -- “the greatest of these is agapé.”

When we know it is agapé that is used in that chapter, then we know we are dealing with the basis for a new spiritual discipline that motivates us to look for a spiritual training that will help us live fully through the power of God.

  

The Liberating Power of Agapé

During these last 150 years of reviving the use of ‘agapé’ as a spiritual term, most people had a hard time accepting it as a word to use because it was considered to be arcane and unusual. But as I looked back into the use of the word by the first Christians, I discovered that it was not a commonly used word at that time either.

So for most Greeks in the 1st Century, when agapé was introduced into spiritual practices, it would have seemed arcane and unusual then. There is no evidence of it being used among average Greeks until St. Paul started using it. His use of it in the 1st Century began in a similar way as it did in the 19th Century: as a spiritual term. It was not used in common Greek language as a word for “love,” but appeared exclusively in religious writings. And that’s how it was used in translating the Gospels.

When I first started studying the way ‘agapé’ was used by St. Paul, I began to see how he used it to express the liberating aspect of spiritual energy. He claimed that agapé was a spiritual power to liberate people from the pressures of their era -- to prepare them for the New Age that was dawning.

He pointed out how the spiritual energy of agapé can keep us from being conformed to the selfish, egotistical, violent pattern of the era he believed was ending. I think his ideas can be useful today because of the overwhelming evidence of what the last 200 years have shown about the selfish, egotistical, violent pattern of our era of history.  

Of course, the liberation of our minds is not easy, because the tremendous pressures from the human world are very difficult to overcome. The forces of this long era of history have been building up for the hundreds of years of the process that has been named ‘civilization.’ (Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “The end of the human race will be that we will eventually die of civilization.” That slow death is what we have to overcome.)

St. Paul considered this spiritual energy to have a transformative quality that should work in a person’s life to help her or him not be conceited or proud, but live kindly in harmony and peace with everyone, even to the point of blessing those who persecute you.

To drive home the difficulty of letting the spiritual energy of agapé be transformative in our living, he ended by talking about not repaying evil for evil, and not taking revenge. But if people resist and are not willing to make the huge effort involved with living by agapé, then their minds stay enslaved to the old pattern of the selfish, egotistical, violent present era of history. 

In the same way as in the 1st Century, we today have to decide to let our minds be liberated from the old, destructive pattern of this era in order to take part in the new way of living. Only spiritual energy is powerful enough to bring about such liberation.

“Agapé” in the Great Shema

Many years ago I started wondering why an ancient Greek word started being used again after not being used for hundreds of years. That word is “agapé.” 

In the 1920’s a Swedish pastor wrote a book about "agapé" in the New Testament. Slowly Christians started using it as people realized that the word “charity” was actually a translation of it. But I wondered how “charity” could be a translation of “agapé.” It turns out that “caritas” is the Latin translation.

Clergy started quoting from the Swedish book in their sermons. I heard the quotes from as widespread a list of preachers as Billy Graham and Rev. Martin Luther King. Then after World War II, agapé started being used in the names of churches and youth choirs. 

At first I couldn’t trace back its origin any farther than to find out it was very important to the first Christians. But what did they think it meant? I finally realized a mistake had been made in the 19th Century. For some strange reason, Bible translators started translating it as “love,” even though it was very clear that whatever the first Christians thought it meant, it didn’t mean love. 

So where did the first Christians get the word? Well, after years of searching, I found it in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures (made by 70 scholars in Egypt a century before Jesus). It was in the most famous passage in Deuteronomy — called the “Great Shema” (because ‘Shema’ is the ancient word, which is — as usual — weakly translated in English as ‘hear’ or ‘listen,’ even though that is far too calm a word for its full meaning). 

You see ‘Shema’ is a Call word: commanding a spiritual experience of the faith community. It is used like blowing the shofar horn: gathering the whole people into a worshipping experience. When those 70 scholars started translating the Great Shema they would have known that it was very important what word they chose to express the way of answering the call to bring each worshiper’s whole being (“all your heart, all your mind, and all your strength”) into a profound experience of divine Presence. 

But they probably realized that no commonly used Greek word carried that full meaning of spiritual power. And that spiritual-experience word they chose was ‘agapé.’ That then becomes the key to the meaning of agapé. Then when the 70 scholars translated Leviticus, they made the profound leap to have that spiritual experience be the basis for what forms the community of the faithful people — the call is extended to “your neighbor as yourself;” thus making the spiritual meaning of agapé the basis for forming a community in worship. Then in the Gospels we have Jesus make the final huge, radical, profound leap to call for that spiritual experience extended to enemies. 

And so the Greek version of the Gospels used ‘agapé.’ I saw that was the reason St. Paul used the word ‘agapé’ to point to the power of spiritual experience.

Engulfed in Agapé

As I was looking out of the window of our new home, I enjoyed seeing our new neighborhood covered in 6 inches of snow from a late Spring storm. Even though the view was beautiful, I have to admit that I started wondering what it would look like when warm Spring weather finally melted the snow and the branches sprouted with leaves.

Then I remembered a late April blog posting I’d made 9 years before. It had developed from a meditation time outdoors in a park near where we’d been living for over 11 years. I remembered that while I meditated, I experienced the radiating Life force of Spring. Then as I went deeper, I had the spiritual sensation of being engulfed in agapé. The memory was so strong, that I looked up that blog posting to read how I expressed it. 

The experience had been so powerful that there was no distinction between agapé filling me from within and agapé surrounding me from outside. In that sense, there was no “within” and no “outside.” The engulfing was complete, and I was joyfully enlivened by the spiritual sensation of being opened to divine Presence.

At the time I’d been reading Ram Dass’ Be Love Now. So after I returned home and was attempting to write about it in a blog posting, I reflected on the one time when Ram Dass admitted that the spiritual experiences he’d been writing about were what the ancient Greeks called “agapé.” He explained the process of sharing in the flow of agapé with these words: 

"If you put out agape, then you immerse yourself in the sea of agape.”

Since that time, the influence of agapé has developed more strongly throughout my life. Agapé consciousness has formed for me in such a way that I have found that it changed the way I developed identity. My identity in life reformed with the vast, formless, eternal Essence. That has helped me release being controlled by any ego-identity. So that has helped me see other people from the viewpoint of the vast, formless, eternal Essence.

Agapé consciousness can develop for all people as we are able to move away from ego-identity and experience our identity with eternal Essence. We can be helped also in our relationships with Life around us, with the expressions of Life in the people and creatures with whom we come into contact. As agapé consciousness develops, we are able to learn an increasingly deeper appreciation for people, other creatures, and all of Creation.

And that learning involves a profound acceptance of eternal, spiritual Presence permeating all the entities within relational fields. Agapé also spreads spiritually throughout all the relationships of life, deepening that relating. Also all relationships are sensed as connected through spiritual Presence.

Agapé as universal love in Erich Fromm’s teaching

 I was able to obtain an eBook edition of Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving. In this book the famous psychologist explores ways that people can become more loving with one another. 

Although Dr. Fromm never uses the word ‘agapé,’ in those places where he uses ‘love’ in a universal, spiritual way that the meaning is ‘agapé,’ I found that I gained deeper awareness of his teaching when the word 'love' was changed to ‘agape’ in the following quotes.

“What matters in relation to agapé is the faith in one’s own agapé; in its ability to produce a reaction of agape in others, and in its reliability.

“The capacity to experience agape demands a state of intensity, awareness, enhanced vitality, which can only be the result of a productive and active orientation in many other spheres of life.

“There is only one proof for the presence of agapé: the depth of the relationship, and the aliveness and strength in each person concerned; this is the fruit by which agape is recognized.

“Agapé is an activity, a power of the soul.

“Agapé encompasses the sense of responsibility, care, respect, knowledge of any other human being, the wish to further another’s life. Agape is love for all human beings; it is characterized by its very lack of exclusiveness.

“Agapé is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it involves an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one “object” of love. Agapé is an active power in us; a power which breaks through the walls which separate one from another, which unites us with others; agapé makes us overcome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits us to be ourselves, to retain our integrity.

“There is no ‘division of labor’ between agapé for one’s own and agapé for strangers.

“If I truly share agapé with one person, I’m open to agapé with all persons, I have agapé with the world, I’m open to agapé with life. If I can say to somebody else, “I share agapé with you,” I must be able to say, “I share agapé with you in everybody, I share agapé through you to the world, I share agapé in you also myself.” 

“Those who are seriously concerned with agapé as the only rational answer to the problem of human existence must arrive at the conclusion that important and radical changes in our social structure are necessary.  To have faith in the possibility of agapé as a social and not only exceptional-individual phenomenon, is a rational faith based on the insight into the very human nature.”

Dr. Fromm’s insights thus fit in with the other insights about agapé that I’ve explored throughout the postings of this blog. In this blog I’ve tried to show what Dr. Fromm meant about “the only rational answer to the problem of human existence.”