Written more than 50 years ago, Lewis's words lay before us the most important choice we will ever be asked to make: "A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was and is the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to." It was a choice I consciously made for the first time nearly 30 years ago. The clear, winning logic of Mere Christianity continues to remind me what an obvious choice it ought to be.
Although I've been a devotee of Lewis for most of my life, reading The Four Loves this fall was a first for me. After reading as much of Lewis's work as I have, I should have been prepared for his clarity of thought and marvellous use of language. Yet I found myself in fresh awe of his ability to express those things that, deep down, so many of us know to be true, but which we so often struggle to articulate.
In the introduction to The Four Loves, Lewis makes the powerful distinction between gift-love and need-love. Divine love, he says, is gift-love. It always has the loved one as its focus. need-love, however, is always somewhat self-interested. It recognizes the loved one as the source of something the lover needs. Obviously, we human beings are capable, at times, of both gift-love and of need-love.
In distinguishing between these two, Lewis himself came to a radical discovery: that we most resemble God when, as human beings, we demonstrate gift-love; yet we come closest to God, in terms of our relationship with Him, when we approach him in need-love. "A very strange corollary follows. Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?" What a powerful reminder that our relationship with God has as its very foundation not a comparison by which we are measured against God, but a miracle by which his gift meets our need. What a wonderful reminder to be offered in the weeks leading up to our celebration of the miracle itself!
