Unconditional Love: Jesus
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| Illustration by ChatGPT |
Unconditional love is not quite humanly possible.
That’s what I’ve learnt from experience. At least not consistently. We are
finite, vulnerable, and shaped by many needs. Our love is inevitably entangled
with expectation, hurt, memory, and self-protection. We withdraw when wounded,
hesitate when trust is broken, and usually give in proportion to what we
receive. Hence, unconditional love is hard to sustain.
Perhaps great souls like Jesus and
Buddha were capable of unconditional love. But even for them, it wouldn’t have
been quite easy or natural. It would have demanded a terrible lot of
discipline. Unconditional love is practised, struggled toward, and perhaps only
intermittently materialised.
Unconditional love requires a
different grammar which does not expect reciprocity, recognition, or reward. I
would like to look at how a man, who is believed by millions to be an
incarnation of the divine, practised unconditional love, if only to help us
understand the concept.
In the person of Jesus as he is
usually understood, we encounter a radically different kind of love, one which
does not negotiate, does not calculate, and does not withdraw. It is a love
that moves towards the unworthy and persists in the face of rejection.
“Love your enemies” was not a poetic
device for him but a moral demand. It is an unsettling command because it
dismantles the logic we are accustomed to. Such love is not a response to merit
but an expression of being. It is not something earned; it is something given.
Conditional love is easy. It is
instinctual. We reward kindness with kindness. We mirror the world back to
itself. Unconditional love interrupts that cycle. It refuses to let another’s
failure dictate one’s own moral horizon.
Unconditional love is unreasonable.
You need a touch of insanity to practise such love. Jesus eats with those whom
society rejects, touches those deemed untouchable, and forgives those who
condemn him. In doing so, he shifts the axis of morality from justice as
balance to love as excess. Justice gives what is due; unconditional
love gives more than what is deserved.
Such love doesn’t condone evil. Far
from it. It confronts evil without surrendering to hatred. It resists injustice
without dehumanising the unjust. It is, in essence, strength disguised as
gentleness.
Such love isn’t easy at all. Nikos
Kazantzakis, one of my favourite novelists, has successfully portrayed the
inner conflicts that Jesus struggled with while practising unconditional love.
Jesus, in The Last Temptation
of Christ, is torn between fear and calling, flesh and spirit, doubt
and faith. Love is not an immediate divine certainty in the novel; it is
something that must be chosen again and again, often against the grain of human
instinct.
At times, this Jesus hesitates. He
recoils from suffering. He is tempted by the possibility of an ordinary life
with its conditional loves. Unconditional love is tough.
Desire, fear, and the
self-preservation instinct – they make love conditional. And Jesus is not
always above them. But he overcomes them with difficulty. Unconditional love is
never easy. It is not the absence of temptation; it is the victory over it.
Unconditional love is not a divine
gift, as the gospels seem to suggest. Kazantzakis teaches us that Jesus becomes
unconditional love through the choices he makes – by passing through doubt,
temptation, and inner conflicts.
PS. This post is a part of Blogchatter A2Z Challenge 2026
Previous Posts in this series
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Ye. By passing through, doubt, temptation, suffering, he learns to become brothers among brothers and sisters... His understanding of the Love of the Father, is totally unsettling, if the Possibles of the Prodigal Father, the Lost Sheep and the parable of the Vineyard labourers are any example. Yes... He was ever striving to be.. Come a Parable of unconditional Love of the Father...
ReplyDeleteThe organised religions founded in his name ruined his real teachings, I think.
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