If we can't even talk, how are we to love?
Jesus on Love and Forgiveness
by
Geoffrey Lasley
Copyright 2026; all rights reserved
Foreword
For the past couple of years, I have spent quite a bit of time and energy exploring love and forgiveness and their relationship to Spirit. I had more or less decided not to share my reflections on the topic since, in my Life Stills: A Spiritual Calculus, I had already written about Spirit and Love/Charity and thought that a prose treatment of the topic would be superfluous. However, I have recently heard from a number of close friends who are having difficulty communicating with their life partners and maintaining the love that had brought them together. Thinking that perhaps I could use this context to expand a bit on the Spirit-Love-Forgiveness dynamic, I have gathered my thoughts into this essay. I hope that you might find it a source of comfort and hope.
In the following pages, I will talk about concepts, events, and experiences generally in declarative sentences, as if they were established truth. This is not because I am an authority on this or any subject whatever, but my desire is to avoid continually repeating, "It has been my experience, and I have come to find through personal reflection, that ..." So, I will say it just the once, at the beginning, and beg your indulgence for not repeating myself. Also, while I will not be quoting any philosophical or religious texts, I will be quoting Jesus (though not the Bible more generally) in talking about love and forgiveness because my friends, who are providing the impetus and context for this essay, and to whom the essay is primarily addressed, are Christian. Non-Christian readers will, I am sure, find as much value in the essay as they have in Life Stills.
Person and Persona I
Interaction
It has been my experience, and I have come to find through personal reflection, that we are all of us persons, individuals differentiated from one another not only by our physical attributes but also by our distinctive behavioral traits. The persons we are today comprise four types of traits – our morals/values traits, emotional traits, personality traits, and physical traits.
We are born human but become persons. This process of becoming a person begins just after birth, when we learn that our various behaviors result in various outcomes, that certain cries result in access to milk, that smiles produce desirable responses from adults. As infants we learn by trial and error that certain behaviors elicit responses conducive to our well-being – we are kept safe, warm, and fed. As we grow, our needs grow as well, from the need to be kept physically safe to include the additional need to be nurtured not only physically, but psychologically and emotionally as well. In adolescence, our need for validation emerges and then, as we mature, our desire for respect is added to the list.
At each stage of our growth, the efficacy of a given behavior (here and hereafter to include speech acts) will depend upon how the people with whom we interact interpret that behavior. What is acceptable behavior at one stage in our personal development will be neither expected nor accepted in another; tantrums work better for toddlers than for adults.
This also holds true when we encounter different environments at the same life stage; a toddler will learn that what is allowed at home is forbidden at day care or vice versa. Healthy growth in how to respond appropriately in different environments depends, of course, on exposure to different environments. A child who spent her childhood under the care of a private nanny may have greater difficulty adjusting to primary school than a child who attended preschool or kindergarten, where she interacted with classmates coming from a relatively wider spectrum of life experiences.
From a lifetime of learned behaviors, a default persona appears – our core persona – with whom the outside world interacts. This persona emerges from our person and is unconsciously adjusted (tweaked, sometimes in real time) as we receive feedback from our environment. These adjustments are made because our persona functions to maximize benefit in meeting our present needs for safety, nurturing, validation, and respect. Our current habits and prejudices formed as we grew up, serving our interest well in that they have protected us and helped us thrive. And in this we are all alike; there are no exceptions.
When we interact with other persons, the person with whom we are interacting is also presenting us a persona, having gone through the same life-long process that resulted in their core persona, which they are tweaking, as our interaction proceeds, to maximize their benefit in terms of safety, nurturing, validation, and respect.
Interpersonal interaction is further complicated by the fact that our persona behaviors are being interpreted by our communication partner through the various lenses of their life experiences (and vice versa). What we might assume from our experience to be a behavior or speech act that expresses our intended message (emerging from and true to our person) might be interpreted by our communication partner as something quite different.
Of course, the message that our partner receives through the lenses of their life experience will differ from our intended message to the extent that our life experiences differ. That is, if our partner in communication is a sibling with whom we have shared a childhood, chances of misinterpretation will be much less than if our partner is a classmate, for example, from a different culture. Even if our partner is from the same primary culture but different subculture, opportunities for misunderstanding will still arise, with chances increasing with cultural distance. The breadth of this cross-cultural communication divide is easily underestimated, especially between subcultures, with each party assuming greater parity than actually exists merely because they share the same primary culture.
The result of this process of interpersonal interaction is that we manage to safely negotiate our lives (and sometimes only barely) by keeping our persons safely tucked away and only our personas available to the outside world, to all those others with whom we come into contact, including those with whom we have a more intimate relationship.
Reaction
Unfortunately, if communication weren't already complex enough, before our personas interact, they too often react. That is, our personas sometimes react viscerally to our communication partner when, as they say, "our buttons are pushed" or we are "triggered" by their behavior. Perhaps because our persons are formed not only by our positive life experiences, but by our negative, traumatic experiences as well, raw nerves, if you will, still lie close to the surface and occasionally (when we are triggered) shock us out of our situational persona and emerge from their deeper resting place in our person into the light of day.
This might happen, for example, if a man, intending to show that he cares for his spouse, does so in a manner (again, including speech acts) that his life experiences have taught him is consistent with his person intent; however, his persona behavior is interpreted by his spouse as chauvinistic and controlling. And, being accused of demonstrating a lack of respect or of being manipulative (because that is the way disrespectful and manipulative people act, in their spouse's experience), the man is hurt. He does not understand how his spouse could think that he is capable of harboring such base motives; his spouse should know him well enough, he believes, to see past his behavior and know that his intentions are noble; his spouse should not see just his persona, but his person – who he truly is on the inside. What he doesn't realize is that even his spouse (whom he feels knows – or should know – him better than anyone) does not see ALL of his person; there are traits (and not all traits are positive) that the spouse has never seen because she has not encountered a situation in which that particular trait has been a significant (and therefore obvious) element of his situational persona.
Getting to know someone can be a long, painstaking (and painful) process. For relationships with those in whom we have less invested, those whose welfare is less closely tied to our own, we might not require an extensive/intensive knowledge of their person. The physical, emotional, intellectual space we share may be very small; in this case, understanding the other's persona is sufficient to maintaining a cordial relationship. In a life Partner, however, this surface understanding is sufficient neither to their happiness nor our own. We hunger to find a life Partner whom we can truly know and with whom we can share our inner self, our person as opposed to our persona.
Communication and communion
However, because we habitually manage our relationships at the persona level, it is difficult for us to leave our habitual behavioral rut/routine (our core persona) and open ourselves to our Partner. We operate with our life Partner as if we were co-workers or teammates. The lives we share are full of everyday tasks that call upon our persona more than our person – we cook, we clean, we shop, we talk about the things, events, people that occupy and overcrowd our lives. We rarely have time to set aside the variations on our core persona that our interaction with life requires we adopt; we have very little time to turn off the persona and allow the person to emerge.
And what little time we do have with our person, we reserve for ourselves so that we might remind ourselves of "who we really are" and the principles and values that we know we have but feel we must compromise as we move through a complex life we share with the rest of the world. We have little time, after reminding ourselves of who we really are, to share our person with our Partner; and when we do have the time and the inclination, there is no guarantee that our Partner will be "in the right place" emotionally or intellectually for the experience.
So, we continue communicating but not communing – even with those we are closest to and value most, those whose personal needs and desires we wish most to see fulfilled and whose companionship we value most as we endeavor to fulfill our own. We are torn between the desire, on the one hand, to dispense with our persona and just be our true person, and the need, on the other hand, to be validated, respected, and even loved, and we fear that doing the former may put the latter at risk – and this even with our life Partner.
We continue as we always have, trying to show our Partner our person while still filtering ourselves through a persona, albeit one truer to our person, perhaps, than the core persona we present to the rest of the world. Is communion between persons possible? Is it possible to put aside our persona and at the same time to somehow part the curtains of our Partner's persona as well and see their true person?
Our best hope, it seems, would be if both Partners could agree on the need to find a deeper foundation for their communication – a new kind of "I'll show you mine if you show me yours" pact that would allow them to move together from communication of personas to the communion of persons. But would such an agreement guarantee love? It would almost certainly guarantee mutual respect – both for the courage and honesty each will need in revealing the person behind the personas that they present to the rest of the world, but also for the courage they will individually need in exploring and discovering in themselves the person they had heretofore never been forced to face and to come to truly know. And this attempt at communion will almost certainly guarantee no little gratitude for being allowed the position of such privileged intimacy with their Partner.
But, still we must ask, is communion between persons possible? In theory, as we have seen, perhaps. But in reality, we must remind ourselves, communication and communion both speak of a shared desire to grow together and a commitment to the hard work that will undoubtedly be required. Unfortunately, one life Partner (or communication partner, for that matter) will often reach a point where they say, "I don't think I am seeing the world or hearing what you say through any kind of personal filter; my experience tells me that most of the world sees things the way I do, and YOU are the one that needs to change."
So, we arrive (and, all too often, really early in the process) at an impasse, at a place where our Partner tells us in no uncertain terms that they are not open to change, and when this happens, communication breaks down and the dream of communion vanishes. And when this happens does love – and maintaining the relationship – also become impossible?
Thankfully, even when affection fades, love can still survive, and that is because we have been blessed with more than one kind of love. We feel love for the people we share a close biological link with – our parents and siblings; a close emotional bond with – our close friends; or a lifelong commitment with – our life Partner – and regardless of how different these emotions feel, we still speak of them all as loving relationships. In addition, as Christians, we have been charged with loving others in yet another way.
Christian Love
Christian love has its roots in the Jewish Scriptures of the Old Testament. Man is first commanded to love just after Moses delivers the 10 Commandments to his people; he tells them that God has additionally commanded that they "Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind" (Deuteronomy 6:5). Here and throughout the Old Testament, when the relationship between man and God is spoken of, the focus is always on the relationship between the Jewish people and their God, not between God and the individual.
Love between individuals, however, is mentioned in the Old Testament – but only the one time – where, there among the 613 commandments that God gave the Jews to govern their social, economic, and ethical behavior, we read (right after the commandments not to lie to one another, oppress our neighbor, rob him, slander him, take vengeance upon or bear a grudge against him, or, finally, to hate him) that God's people should, "love your neighbor as yourself" (Leviticus 19:18). It is clear that here, and in the other interpersonal commandments, the focus is on how the Jews should treat one another and so remain "a people," "His people, His treasured possession."
In the cases of both love of God and love of neighbor, the Hebrew word for love is aheb. This Hebrew word applies to the affection between God and his people as well as covering all cases of affection between individuals (both platonic and sexual). We will find, as we read the New Testament, that using Greek (which has more terms for "love") allows Jesus to distinguish spiritual love from worldly love, and to therefore define what we have to come to think of as "Christian" love.
Jesus' ministry
Jesus' ministry focused on guiding his fellow Jews from what he saw as a surface persona relationship with God to a relationship based on love at a deeper level, a level deeper than persona and deeper even than person. His ministry was to awaken His people from their performative faith, where the commandments existed only in their holy books, to a faith where the law is written "into their minds and onto their hearts" (Jeremiah 31:33).
In speaking of this personal relationship with God, Jesus tells his fellow Jews to, "Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them;" and "when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others;" and "when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others;" and “when you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their faces to show others they are fasting." Jesus tells them instead that they should pray, give, and fast in secret (and so with their person and not with their persona) "so that it will not be obvious to others ... but only to your Father, who is unseen; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you" (Matthew 6:6-18).
Likewise, when speaking of their relationship to other men, Jesus told them that it is not enough to just act – or not act – in their public persona in keeping God's commandments, but that their behavior should reflect what is in their hearts (their person) (Matthew 5:21 ff), that they should demonstrate the "spirit" of the law as well as the "letter." This was Jesus "fulfilling (making perfect; making complete) the Law and the Prophets" (Matthew 5:17).
21 “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’
22 But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire."
...
27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’
28 But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart."
When it came to love, though, Jesus did not merely perfect the "spirit" but also amended the "letter" of the law (Matthew 5:43-48):
43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate our enemy.’
44 But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,
45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.
46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?
47 And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?
48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect."
Jesus here expands the exhortation to love to include loving those who would harm us, those who are our enemies. He tells us that merely loving our friends and neighbors is just not enough, that in loving we should "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." But what is this "perfect love?" Can we really love our enemies? Is it really possible for us to be "perfect as God is perfect"?
Jesus on love
Surely, this new kind of love, a love extending even to those who would wish us ill, was different from the love that all Jews were familiar with, the love for neighbor that was taught them in their Scriptures. Much later in His ministry, at the Last Supper, we see Jesus return to the topic of love, giving his disciples one final commandment (John 13:34-5):
34 "A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.
35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
In this new commandment, Jesus is not telling his disciples – and us – to love yet another class of persons (friends, neighbors, strangers, enemies seems to cover just about everybody); here Jesus is telling us how to love. (And because this is a different kind of love, hereafter I will capitalize it so that we know the difference.) This is Jesus' new Love, a perfect Love, as we shall see, in Spirit.
Just prior to the Last Supper quote, above, Jesus had been telling his disciples that he would be going away to somewhere they could not follow. Then, he said that they should Love each other as He has Loved them. That is, after he had just told them that He would no longer be with them, he commanded them to Love each other not as they loved Him, but as He Loved them. He is not telling them that, because in future their teacher would not be by their side, they should depend upon each other and learn from each other the way they depended upon and learned from Him. He is telling them something very different. He is not merely telling them to love one another; He is telling them about an entirely new kind of Love.
In the next verse (John 13:35), Jesus says that others will be able to tell that they are His disciples by the way they Love each other. This tells us that the kind of Love that they should have for each other (the kind of Love that He had for them) is dramatically different from the love that was commanded between all Jews in the Old Testament – so obviously different that other Jews would be able to recognize it. What kind of Love was this, then, and did his disciples know what he meant?
Later, still at the Last Supper, Jesus returns to the theme of Love. In John 14:15-21, we find Jesus telling his disciples:
15 “If you love me, keep my commands.
16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever —
17 the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.
18 I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.
19 Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live.
20 On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.
21 Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them.”
This is a very complex passage and contains a lot worth looking at more closely. Directly concerning Love, we have two verses:
15 "If you love me, keep my commands."
and
21 "Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me."
Verse (15) is straight forward – "if you Love me, you should obey/observe/follow/keep my commands." Verse (21), however, is different. Here, Jesus is not talking about how you should act if you Love him. He is actually defining Love. Whoever has His commands, Jesus says, and keeps them, is one who Loves Him. That is, perfect Love is the having and keeping of the commandments, and the having and keeping of the commandments is perfect Love. One is not a condition of the other, nor is one a manifestation of the other – doing the one is being the other.
If we look closely, we can see another way in which verses (15) and (21) are different. They both tell us that those who Love Jesus follow his commandments; so why the "Whoever has my commands ..." part of verse (21)? What does that mean, to "have" His commandments, and how is it different from merely "keeping" them? To keep/obey/observe/follow His commandments is to act in a certain way. This behavior is what others see; this is what our persona does. To "have" His commandments is different.
In the New Testament, this word, "to have" (Greek, echo) appears 76 times in the Book of John. Of those 76 times, only 9 times does John mean what we might expect it to mean – to actually possess or hold an object. The other 67 times that he uses the word, it means to "have" a relationship (I have a friend, he has a wife, a kingdom has a king) (16x); to have life (13x); to have health, illness, pain, a demon, or sin (17x); to keep one's word or commandment (5x); to spend or have time (an hour/day etc.) (5x); have a need, honor, glory, reason, peace (9x); or to have love (2x). Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (entry 2192), notes that the meaning of echo extends, as it does here in this passage, to having "intellectual or spiritual faculties, endowments, virtues, sensations, desires, emotions, affections, faults, defects, etc.."
So, what we see here is that "having" and "keeping" the commandments means that we not only observe/follow the commandments/laws in our behavior (our persona) but that the commandments have been internalized – the commandments have become an intimate part of our being (deeper even than our person); the commandments (including the commandment to Love) define not what we do or how we act, but who we are. Our relationship with Jesus is not that we Love Him or that He Loves us; it is more intimate than that.
Perfect Love
To see just how intimate, we need to go back and look at the other parts of John 14:15-21:
15 “If you love me, keep my commands.
16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever—
17 the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.
18 I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.
19 Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live.
20 On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.
21 Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them.”
At first reading, this passage seems a bit disjointed, with Love in the first line and then again in the next-to-last, with lots of other stuff in between. But we can see that there are three major points Jesus is making. First, as we have seen, Jesus is pointing out the difference between keeping His commandments (an act of persona) and having His commandments (an act deeper even than person; a state of being, a way of Spirit). Second, Jesus tells us of Spirit:
1. The Father will give you an advocate to help you and be with you forever (remember, Jesus has told them that he is leaving them) (16).
2. This is the Spirit of truth (17).
3. The world (worldly men) cannot accept Spirit because they cannot see (perceive) Spirit or know of Him (they have no proof of Spirit) (17).
4. You (being spiritual as opposed to worldly) do know him because he lives with you and will be in you (17).
Jesus, here, is repeating to his disciples what he told the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:24), that, "God is spirit, and His worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth," meaning that worshipers should worship not through acts of persona in the temple, but should worship in Spirit, unrestricted in place or time. Jesus is also telling His disciples that the worldly cannot perceive (are not sensitive to) Spirit and therefore do not know of Spirit, but that, because they themselves are not worldly, Spirit will live with them, be with them, and be in them forever. And this leads to the final topic of this passage – what it means that Spirit will be in them.
To summarize, Jesus tells his disciples that:
1. God is Spirit (from John 4:24)
2. God will send an "advocate," the Spirit, to be with them forever (16).
3. This is the Spirit of truth (17).
4. Spirit cannot be accepted (recognized as true) by worldly men because they have no proof of Him; they (his disciples), however, are different, for they know Him because He lives with them and will be in them (17).
And, further, they will realize (at some later time) that (20):
5. Jesus is in the Father
6. They are in Jesus
7. Jesus is in them
Remember that Jesus was telling his disciples all of this at what He knew would be His last opportunity to meet with them all together – at the Last Supper. Jesus is, in this His last opportunity, trying to transmit His deepest teaching to His disciples. He had just told them (John 14:11) that, "I am in the Father and the Father is in me," and is now telling them that He is in them and they are in Him as well.
Jesus is telling his disciples (and us) that God is Spirit and Spirit is in Him and also in us; and that the Spirit that is in us is also in Jesus; and the Spirit that is in Jesus is in the Father, and by extension, the Spirit that is in us is in the Father, and that of the Father is in us. All this taken together means that the Spirit in us is not distinct and separate from the Spirit in Jesus and the Spirit in the Father – God, Jesus, the disciples, us, all men are consubstantial in Spirit.
This should not be surprising if we remember how this all began: "Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath (Hebrew neshemah, breath, spirit, soul) of life, and the man became a living being" (Genesis 2:7). God breathed Spirit into the first man, and through him to all men – the worldly as well as the spiritual.
All of this tells us that it is less accurate to say, "God loves" than to say, with John, that, "Whoever does not Love does not know God, because God is Love," (1 John 4:8) and also that "Whoever lives in Love lives in God" (1 John 4:16). This is perfect Love, in which there is neither lover nor beloved, for Love is not an act, but Charity – undifferentiated and unmediated Love, a way of being.
This is the perfect Love that Jesus tells us enables us to Love our enemy. It is not that we have affection for someone who wishes us ill or that we should befriend them, but that we recognize that beneath the persona that threatens us, beneath the person whose life experiences have molded this person's character into one that can manifest itself in such behavior, there lies Spirit – the selfsame Spirit that they and we inherited as our birthright, unchanged from our birth, untouched by time, and unblemished by personal experience.
The final (and clearest) illustration that Jesus gives us of the distinction between love as affection and Love as Spirit came after His resurrection. After sharing a meal with a number of His disciples, Jesus took Peter aside and asked him directly (John 21:15-17) if he Loved Him:
15 When they had finished eating, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these [others, your friends]?”
“Yes, Lord,” he said, “you know that I love you.”
Jesus said, “Feed my lambs.”
16 Again Jesus said, “Simon son of John, do you love me?”
He answered, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.”
Jesus said, “Take care of my sheep.”
17 The third time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?”
Peter was hurt because Jesus asked him the third time, “Do you love me?” He said, “Lord, you know all things; you know that I love you.”
Jesus said, “Feed my sheep."
In this conversation, when Jesus first asks Peter if he Loves Him, He uses the Greek word agape – the word that is used most often for "love" in the New Testament and which refers exclusively to the social/moral love between men and between God and man. It was in this sense that the writers of the New Testament considered it closest in meaning to the Hebrew word for love (aheb, see above) in the Old Testament, since it is the only Greek word whose meaning extends to the love between God and man.
However, when he responds that he loves Jesus, Peter uses the Greek word phileo, which is also translated as "love" in the New Testament. This word describes the warm affection of intimate friendship (a meaning also carried by the Hebrew aheb) but is never used for love between God and man, for a Love in Spirit. It seems that Peter's "love" and Jesus' "Love" are different.
When Jesus asks Peter a second time (again using agape) if he Loves Him, Peter once more responds with phileo. And when He asks Peter the third time if he loves Him, Jesus finally asks using phileo, and Peter responds using phileo as well. In this brief conversation, Jesus is using the two Greek terms to make what should have been an unmistakable distinction, a distinction that Peter, unfortunately, is not yet able to understand.
If, after learning about Jesus' radical new Love, a perfect Love not as act but as being, we would like to follow his teaching, is it truly possible to be perfect in Love, as He exhorts us to be? What does being perfect look like, and how can one achieve it?
Realizing perfect Love
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us that, if we are prevented by our worldly attachments from realizing/internalizing the commandments, we should sacrifice our flesh rather than being controlled by it, that we should pluck out an eye or cut off a limb if we are offended by it. Of course, this is not a call to self-mutilation but to Self-sacrifice, as when Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek when struck, to give away our cloak when sued for our tunic, to go an extra mile when pressed to walk the first, to give to the needy and not to refuse those who would borrow from us, all these in demonstration of what little regard we, in perfect Love, have for worldly things and of how little we have to fear from the world. Nothing that happens in the world can touch Spirit, which, by birthright, we share with God and all men. That is what perfect Love looks like. But is it achievable? Of course it is.
Jesus tells us explicitly what is required of us in the story of the Rich Young Man. In this story, Jesus makes it absolutely clear that, even those whose behavior is impeccable, those who live public (persona) and private (person) lives in accordance with all the commandments must, if they wish to pass through the narrow gate to perfection, do what He tells the young man: “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me," for "everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life" (Matthew 19:16-21, 29).
There are a couple of important points that Jesus is making here, and neither of them is hyperbole; Jesus means exactly what He says. First, He tells us to abandon all our material possessions. Moreover, He tells us that we should abandon all our personal relationships and livelihoods as well. He has given us this message elsewhere (Luke 14:26): "If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters – yes even their own life – such a person cannot be my disciple." Of course, Jesus is not telling us to hate those we cherish most; He telling us that the people in our lives contribute as much to our need for a persona as the material possessions and professional occupations that define us in society, and that if we wish to join Him on the journey to perfection in Spirit, we must abandon our attachment to them all.
The more important point, perhaps, in this admonition to leaving all person/persona defining objects/people behind, is the one most easily glossed over. When Jesus is talking to the Rich Young Man, He tells him, "If you would be perfect, go sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven ..." Note that Jesus is describing the conditions the young man must meet if he would "be perfect" – not "become perfect." The Greek word for "become" or "transform" does appear elsewhere in The New Testament (Philippians 3:21), but Jesus is not using it here. Here, Jesus is telling this young man to "be" perfect, just as He commanded in the Sermon on the Mount, where, after telling us that we must Love our enemy as well as our neighbor, Jesus commands us to "be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect," implying that the Rich Young Man already IS perfect in Spirit and in Love but is prevented from realizing that perfection by his attachment to the world.
All major religious traditions carry this same message, that if we want to pursue perfection in Spirit, we must leave the world behind. While very few of us are called to the renunciant lifestyle of Jesus and his disciples, there are ways for us to retain our lay lifestyle and still experience, however briefly, this perfect Love. If we cannot withdraw from the world, at least we can, for a short time, retreat from it.
Just as all major religious traditions have monastic paths that lead renunciants toward the goal of perfection in Spirit, all traditions have found ways to offer the laity the opportunity to temporarily retreat from the worldly life and walk, if only for a short distance, that same path. The path described by the anonymous 14th Century Catholic mystic author of the Path of Unknowing is now made accessible to the lay person in Centering Prayer spiritual retreats; less contemplative in their orientation are the Way of Ignatius Catholic retreats, which are becoming more and more popular among Episcopalians, Methodists, and Presbyterians; and, finally, there are meditative Vipassana retreats that, while rooted in Buddhism, are strictly non-sectarian and attract participants from all religious traditions. All of these spiritual retreats offer the opportunity (some for a few days and others for 10 days or more) to "get away from it all," to get as close to Spirit – and as far away from persona – as possible.
During their temporary withdrawal from the world, as they reflect on their persona and how far it might differ from their person and their person from Spirit, many retreat participants wrestle with the question of forgiveness, both divine and interpersonal.
Christian Forgiveness
Just as the Old Testament spoke of interpersonal love as a "love of neighbor" that would promote and maintain social harmony among God's people, when the rabbis counseled the Jews about forgiveness for personal affront (and not for monetary debt or loss of property) it was about how to remedy interpersonal discord when the commandment to love of neighbor had failed.
The rabbinical literature tells us that when an interpersonal unhappiness occurred, the offending party was responsible for making the first move to set things right; they expressed regret, asked for forgiveness, and (if the situation called for it) offered compensation. The offended party was obligated to receive the offender's offer to mend the rift, and, if they felt the offender was sincere in their apology, to offer forgiveness (Hebrew: mechillah). This is what we might call, "act forgiveness;" that is, the act of granting solicited forgiveness that happens at the persona level.
The rabbis also taught a second kind of forgiveness (Hebrew: selichah), which we can think of as "mode forgiveness;" that is, the feeling of forgiveness arising from the sympathy that the one offended has for the human suffering of the offender. Mode forgiveness does not necessarily precede, accompany, or follow act forgiveness, nor is it necessarily expressed. Not all offenses are sufficiently consequential to arouse mode forgiveness, and some offenses are so great that such sympathy would be impossible. A third forgiveness for the Jews was divine forgiveness (Hebrew: kaphar; atonement, reconciliation), by which God (and only God) could wipe one's sins completely away.
Just as act love of neighbor was insufficient for Jesus, neither act forgiveness (expressed by persona) nor mode forgiveness (arising from person) reaches to the level that we see Jesus' perfect Love reaching, a level where we do not love but where we are perfect Love, characterized by us being in Him and He in us, we in each other, and all together in the Father. If divine forgiveness is God's province alone, is there no perfect interpersonal Forgiveness equivalent to the perfect Love to which Jesus exhorts us? Jesus tells us that there is.
Jesus on forgiveness
The two most oft quoted occasions when Jesus directly refers to interpersonal forgiveness (and not forgiveness of obligations as in the parables) are in the Lord's Prayer ("...forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us") and in his conversation with Peter, who asked him how many times he should forgive someone who had sinned against him. In these two instances, and throughout the New Testament, a single Greek word, aphiemi, was used for forgiveness, both divine and interpersonal. The conversation with Peter correlates directly with our topic of interpersonal communication and forgiveness, and, like his conversation with Jesus about Love, it is particularly revealing. Here is the Bible passage (Matthew 18:21-22):
21 Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, "Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother who sins against me? Up to seven times?"
22 Jesus answered, "I tell you, not just seven times, but seventy times seven!"
The Greek word for "sin" that Peter uses in this conversation is amartano, the New Testament's principal term for the act of sinning. The word itself means, "To sin, to miss the mark, to err" (Strong's Greek 264); the term was commonly used in ancient Greek historical literature to refer to an archer having missed his target. In its Biblical use, "to sin" means to "miss the mark" in the sense that to sin means to act in a manner incompatible with our "target" of living in accord with the Scriptural commandments governing man's relationship with God and with other men; in Peter's case, he is asking how many times he should forgive someone who has offended him.
Rabbinical teaching at the time held that, if someone repeatedly offended you, you need act forgive them only three times; after forgiving for the third time, the offended party was under no obligation to respond in any way whatsoever and could not be faulted for not living in accordance with the commandments. So, even though Peter was being unusually generous in his offer of seven forgivings, Jesus told Peter that he must forgive seventy times seven (equivalent to the modern gazillion) times. Essentially, Jesus was telling Peter that his forgiveness should be limitless.
When Jesus responds to Peter's question, He is not talking about how many times Peter should act forgive someone who has offended him; nor is he talking about how Peter should mode forgive him out of sympathy for his personal suffering. Jesus here is talking about a third kind of forgiveness – state Forgiveness, perfect Forgiveness. This perfect Forgiveness, like Jesus' perfect Love is not of the persona or even of the person; Forgiving is not something you do or something you feel, but is, like perfect Love, a state of being.
Even after having left worldly life, Peter is still very much of the world and is still thinking as one with an obligation (at the persona level) to keep the commandment to forgive, and not as one who has chosen the narrow path to having the commandments to Love and Forgiveness. He still hasn't walked far enough on that path to learn that perfect Love, the "Father in Him, He in us, and we in each other," being absent of Self and empty of Other, obviates both the possibility of being offended and the need for any type of interpersonal forgiveness. This is the "holy indifference" of which the Catholic Saints speak, a state of indifference to our physical, emotional, economic, and social well-being that is engendered as we grow closer to perfect Love and perfect Forgiveness, a state where act forgiveness is an offering of grace and mode forgiveness simply unintelligible.
Person and Persona II
In growing to Spirit, we find ourselves revisiting our person – our values, our beliefs, our ethics, those aspects of ourselves that developed in response to our interpersonal, material, social, and physical environments – and reforming our person upon a foundation consisting more now of Love and Forgiveness. Likewise, as it is formed of our person, our persona will gradually align more closely with our new person, which, as we mature in Spirit, grows increasingly robust. Our new person and the persona being built upon it, will, for a while even after a retreat experience, be fragile and subject to constant pressure to revert to the us that the people close to us have become accustomed to. Because our person/persona will, like stretched dough, want to return to its former shape, we have to be constantly vigilant. This vigilance might take the form of purposeful reflection, meditation, and prayer, and, of course, participation in additional retreats.
As we continue our growth to Spirit, it is important to remember that we are not becoming "someone else." We are not going to lose our person or our persona; they will still be there, but will become more refined and increasingly consistent with Spirit. Jesus is the perfect example of what this looks like.
Jesus: The archetype of Spirit, person, persona
Just like the rest of us, Jesus had different personas by which different people identified Him: to society at large, he was the son of Joseph, the carpenter; to His mother he was the dutiful son; to the "establishment," he was a rebel; to the ill, a healer; to the possessed, an exorcist; to the common man, a rabbi; and to his followers, their beloved master and mentor. We don't think of Jesus as having so many personas because the distance between these personas and His person and that between His person and His Spirit was so close and His presentation so consistent. But Jesus did have different personas and would switch between them (just as we do) at any given moment as the situation required, and could drop His persona altogether and call directly upon Spirit if the occasion called for it. There is one instance where we see Jesus doing exactly that. In the story we just read of the Rich Young Man (Mark 10:17-21), we see Jesus walking among the crowd that had gathered to hear him teach. The young man approached Jesus:
17 As Jesus started on his way, a man ran up to him and fell on his knees before him. “Good teacher," he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
18 “Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good — except God alone.
19 You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, you shall not defraud, honor your father and mother.'"
20 “Teacher,” he declared, “all these I have kept since I was a boy.”
21 Jesus looked at him and loved him. “One thing you lack,” he said. “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”
We already read this story when we were looking at the commitment needed if one would be perfect. The interesting thing for us now is there in line 21, where Jesus "looked at him and Loved him." This is Jesus going from Jesus as rabbi (persona) looking at and quoting the Scriptures to a stranger who has approached him on the street, to Jesus Loving him from Spirit – calling upon the "He in the Father and the Father in Him and He in the young man and the young man in both Him and in the Father" – and this done in real time in meeting this young man's need for Jesus to look into his heart, confirm his lifelong adherence to the commandments, gauge his nearness to Spirit, and advise him how he should proceed.
Compassion as the foundation for our new person/persona
From this anecdote, we can see that we need not fear that, as we grow closer to Spirit, to perfect Love and perfect Forgiveness, we will lose the ability to love affectionately or act- or mode-forgive; these will remain part of who we are, though they will take on an increasingly (as we grow to Spirit) more compassionate character. Actually, the closer we grow to perfect Love and perfect Forgiveness, the easier we find act forgiveness, since the reluctance to act forgive arises from fear. As Love and Forgiveness form a new foundation for person, and the more closely our core persona aligns with the Loving and Forgiving person, the less importance we will place on the safety, nurturing, validation, and respect that our ego, our Self, has in the past desired, and the less fearful we will be of being hurt.
Very, very few are called to the life of renunciation, to the pursuit of perfect Love and perfect Forgiveness. Jesus tells us that doing this – renouncing the world – is what we should do if we would be perfect; but knowing us the way He does, He neither expects nor requires this commitment. For us, now that we acknowledge Jesus' message of perfect Love and perfect Forgiveness, we know that act/persona forgiveness is sufficient only to those incidental bumps in our relationships that come with proximity, and that we should cultivate an "elevated" mode forgiveness in our person, from which we feel a spiritual sympathy – a compassion – for the suffering of another "vessel of Spirit."
This compassion, rooted in the recognition of our birthright to Spirit, goes beyond the pity that moves us to drop a few coins into a beggar's bowl and beyond the sympathy for the less fortunate that moves us, in an effort to extend our reach beyond the length of our arm, to make a donation to our favorite non-profit. This compassion, an acknowledgment of Spirit in Jesus and Him in us and us in Him and in each other, enables us to look past another's smiling persona to see the traces of the tears they shed in private – to see their worry over their younger child, who for the past few days has had no appetite; to see their anxiety over their elder child, who they suspect has been bullied at school; to see the stress they are under because they haven't been able to find time to prepare for the meeting they have this afternoon; or to feel with them the often unbearable weight of witnessing, through a seemingly ubiquitous "news feed," the suffering of an entire world.
This compassion is founded not upon the very human love and forgiveness that moves us to put the other's needs before our own, that moves us to joy at their joy and sorrow at their sorrow, but on Jesus' perfect Love and perfect Forgiveness, from which we realize that happiness and unhappiness are of persona, that joy and sorrow are of person still, and that in perfect Love there is only union in Spirit, and peace, and the stillness of being. Growing in Spirit, we develop a compassion that allows us to see and feel the other's pain and, knowing that they are also Spirit, to Love them. And as we grow closer to God, to Spirit, this compassion grows to include not only our life Partner and those closest to us, but, over time, to encompass and embrace in a Great Compassion, all living beings.
Personal change
In the first section of this essay, we talked about the difference between communication and communion and saw how too often one life Partner just shuts down and lets the other know that, because they don't see that there is a need, they will not change. But here's the thing: as we get closer to God, to Spirit, other people change.
Our life Partner changes from being a self-centered, uncommunicative, stubborn, manipulative person to being another suffering Spirit trapped within a fleshy vessel that has been formed, by both their life experience and their need to survive, into the person and persona before us. While this may sound like our life Partner hasn't changed at all, but merely our perception of them, that is enough. Well, perhaps not quite enough. But all we can do is change ourselves, from the reactive persona others see us as to the persona we wish to become, a persona closer to the person we have, through this journey to Spirit, found ourselves to be. And as the greatest "environmental" factor now influencing our Partner's core persona, the person we are becoming (and the persona with whom our Partner interacts) will have an enormous impact on how they change.
As our person grows closer to Spirit, and our persona closer to our person, our behavior – how we interact with the world in general and with our Partner specifically – will change, and we will speak and act more from compassion in Spirit than from biology. And from this compassion will grow patience, and from patience not just better listening but better hearing, and taking to heart what the other is saying – or not saying – or saying but not meaning – or meaning to say but holding inside. In time, as our behavior changes, our Partner's behavior (at least toward us) will change as well. As their fear of being judged diminishes, our Partner's instinct to self-protection will diminish, allowing their persona to move closer to the person they have always wished we could see.
Conclusion
To follow Jesus' admonition that we Love others as He Loved us is to pass through a very narrow gate. Accessing this narrow gate to Love and to Forgiveness requires that we be Self-less, for Jesus has told us that Loving Him and Loving others means that we are in Him just as He is in Spirit, and Spirit in Him and He in us; and, by extension, Spirit is in us and we in Spirit and in each other. He has told us that, in the end, the "love your neighbor as yourself" of the Old Testament, has, in "fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets" become, "Love your neighbor because he IS yourself" in a shared consubstantiality of Spirit, our common birthright not only to Loving, but to being Love.
Afterword
Our individual commitment to the re-constructing of our person and persona based on the acknowledgment (if not the direct experience) of our consubstantiality in Spirit does not guarantee the return of the affection that brought us together with our Partner. Further, our personal growth to Spirit does not demand that we stay in an unhappy relationship while we wait for our efforts to bear fruit. Lives begun together in the greatest affection sometimes do become untenable, and compassion and even Love and Forgiveness do not always lead to reconciliation.
Partners having difficulty communicating and, as a result, also having difficulty maintaining the love that brought them together, might find it helpful to invite a third person into their effort to help identify those habitual behaviors (as always, including speech acts) that are creating barriers to honest, loving communication between their persons. Of course, ideally this third person would be a licensed therapist or counselor, someone trained in both eliciting genuine self-assessment and in facilitating clear, honest communication. (Licensed professionals in your geographic area can be found at the Psychology Today web site.)
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