The latest analogy I’ve heard for how agape works is “God loving through you.” Now, the way I would see that analogy working is in a double way -- as agape usually works -- first with God flowing agape to you, then second with God extending the flow of agape power out from you to someone (or some creature) who needs the spiritual power of agape to help them.
Of course, there’s always a catch with analogies: they aren’t real, so if you try to push them too far, they dissolve. So for that analogy, the point of dissolving occurs with the words ‘loving’ and ‘you.’ What I mean first is that agape is spiritually far more than what most people normally mean by ‘loving.' Then the second point is what can be called the paradox of spirituality: in the spiritual flowing of agape, there is no ‘you.’
For the first point, about ‘loving,’ I mean that most people think of ‘love’ in strictly human terms; but of course, we know that God does not ‘love’ as a human being loves. So people get a wrong image, because the spiritual power of God is so far beyond what human love could ever possibly be. And of course, that’s why St. Paul started using a different Greek word than the one that meant ‘love’ to Greek-speaking people. As I’ve written so many times in this blog, that’s why Paul started using the very unusual word, ‘agape.’ To him it expressed the power of God that goes beyond the meaning of love.
The second point was expressed by Paul by using the word that gets translated into English as ‘ambassador’ when he said, “We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.” (2 Cor. 5:20) In that sense, we are like agents, even where agape is concerned. But where even that analogy breaks down is where we think human action is.
What I called ‘the paradox of spirituality’ comes with God’s action. We perceive the action as coming from us, but it is actually God acting through us. But even such ‘action’ is so powerful that it doesn’t actually involve us -- or especially it doesn’t involve our ego identity in any way whatsoever. That refers to the identity we usually mean when we use words like ‘I,’ ‘me,’ and ‘mine.’ In the sense of those ego-identity words, I couldn’t say, “God is loving through me.” So using the wording of that analogy, agape is actually God loving God. But of course, no one would say it that way.
But the slight point of the analogy is that agape is not human-generated. It is strictly a spiritual term, and each of us needs to ‘sense’ it that way. Agape is actually opening up our awareness of what God’s Presence is doing.
