Unconditional Love: Jesus

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

Authority	Bigotry	Courage
Dissent	Empathy	Faith
Gaslighting	Hero Worship	Integrity
Joker	Kafka in His Labyrinth	Loyalty vs Conscience
Majoritarianism	Negative Capability	Outrage Culture
Populism	Quixotism	Rhetoric
Self & Society	Tolerance	è Vulnerability