Preamble
I want to draw a few lessons from the fact that God is love (1 Jn 4:8, 16).
God and Unrequited Love
It's not hard to show that God is intimately acquainted with unrequited love:
- God loves everyone. God desires all to be saved (1 Tim 2:4). God loves the world, not just the "saved" (Jn 3:16, cf. Mt 5:45)
- Not everyone loves God and everyone does not love God as they ought.
Does God experience Unrequited Love?
If you take the Bible seriously, the answer is yes! The God of the Bible is not the product of the "philosophy shop", to borrow a phrase of William James (a philosopher!). I think the biggest obstacle in assessing God's relationship to unrequited love is that our conception of God precludes such emotions. However, the Bible witnesses to God's emotions. Take Isaiah 63:10 as an example:
But they rebelled and grieved his holy spirit...The Hebrew word for "grieved" here means to hurt or to pain. A similar idea is expressed in Ephesians 4:30, where Paul commands: "do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God". The Greek word lupeo means to cause sadness. It is because of this verse that Barth said "the God proclaimed in Ephesians is not an unmoved mover."
If we need any more proof that God experiences emotions akin to unrequited love we need look no further than the famous verse in John: "Jesus wept" (11:35). The very next verse speaks of Jesus' great love associated with this weeping.
Lessons
God feels our pain when we love but are not loved back. We need not feel guilty in loving someone who does not love us back. God is not guilty for loving those who do not love back (most people) or do not love as they ought (everyone).
For me, the trickiest aspect of unrequited love is to let love be love and not to try to coerce or manipulate the beloved into loving back. Love requires freedom and God risked a universe where people were free to love or not. God does not coerce. I claim the essence of love is a reciprocal, give-and-take relationship, based on the trinity. The Biblical record is pretty clear that God's pursuit of our love is not coercive. I get the hunch that when Jesus preached he simply offered himself freely but did so in a way that protected the freedom of the hearers. The passage in Luke about the rich man and Lazarus is instructive. At the end of this story, the rich man is sort of begging that his kin be coerced so that they will love God, but Abraham says that God's side of the love equation is sufficient (Moses and the prophets, let alone a resurrected Son!) so that the rich man's kin are without excuse.
Sure, God pursues us hard and he sent his Son to die and rise again, but this pursuit is not coercive. God doesn't infringe on human freedom, and does so at great costs, so neither should we. Love is a reciprocal deal and when the give-and-take breaks down love will eventually cease. That is a bitter pill to swallow but that is the witness of Scripture. People reject God even after the love shown at the cross.
Unrequited love is a bummer. This is a lesson we can learn from God's love for us. God's will is not always done here on earth. This is why Jesus prays that it will be done! You don't pray for something you think is a theological impossibility. But the bummer of unrequited love is not alleviated by manipulating our beloved. God doesn't do it and neither should we. To borrow another phrase from William James, unrequited love proves there are always dregs at the bottom of the cup, no matter how good the coffee.
