Loving and Liking

If you’re anything like me, there are many people in this world, in your town - possibly in your own street - that you don’t like.  Maybe they have a bad reputation, perhaps you’ve seen them behaving badly, or you might even dislike something about them that you would never refer to in public, such as their race or sexual orientation!

We are conditioned to think of liking as a mild form of loving.  Let’s begin in the dictionary, where we find “like: verb, find agreeable or enjoyable or satisfactory; choose to have, prefer.” “love: verb, feel deep fondness for; delight in, admire, greatly cherish.”  So, there is some justification for that view of one being a  more intense form of the other.  But ...

In the Gospels, ‘love’ is found with either ‘God’ or ‘Jesus’ some 40 times.  Only twice is this not in the context of love either by or for the Divine; these are in the two accounts of the parable of the servant who had two masters and ‘loved the other’ (Matt. 6:24, Luke 16:13).  Substitute ‘like’ for ‘love’, and the number of incidences is halved but, more significantly, all but one of these is descriptive, e.g, ‘like a child’, ‘like a dove’ and so on.  The only exception is ‘sir, we would like to see Jesus’ (John 12:21).  None of the Biblical examples shows ‘like’ as an emotion between two people.

I feel justified, therefore, in claiming that the emotion to which Scripture exhorts us is to love, and it is the same love that God has for mankind ... all of mankind.  Liking is altogether different, and I’d say that the dictionary’s definition of finding something agreeable is not far from the mark.  If we look at some of the folks with whom we share our living space and find them ‘not agreeable or enjoyable’ because of how they look or smell, or what they do, then that’s no more than a matter of preference.  It’s part of our God-given individuality that we enjoy some things and not others. 

What is important is how we treat them.  Jesus tells us to ‘love one another ... as I have loved you’ (John 13:34), and the issue is really how we express that love.  The challenge is to treat those we don’t like the same as we treat those that we do, and whose company we do enjoy.  If we do things for our friends, smile at them and joke with them, we should be no less willing to treat that refugee family or the smelly tramp on the street corner in exactly the same way.

Next time you see one of those people you don’t like ... you don’t have to feel guilty about not liking them.  But remember that God loves them, and ask how you can express to them that duty of love.