Suspicious Minds
By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.—John 13:35
Division and hatred mark our world. It has always been this way. Some say it is worse now than ever before. That may be true. I tend to think it is simply more public now than it has ever been. From Twitter to TikTok, we are able to say exactly what we think, whenever we think it—to whomever cares to listen.
We are divided, and we are hateful—I think—because Americans are suspicious. We believe there is always a hidden agenda, and we are on a quest to discover what, precisely, that agenda might be. We are suspicious of the media. We are suspicious of our government. We are suspicious of other governments. We are suspicious of politicians. We are suspicious of liberals. We are suspicious of conservatives. We are suspicious of any category of people of which we are not a part.
I am not certain why we are as suspicious as we are, but I feel comfortable in saying that we are approaching Peak Suspicion.
I am in favor of shrewdness, of realism. I am opposed to naïveté, to Pollyanna-ish thinking. But I must wonder: Is this level of suspicion helpful?
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Most people reflexively believe the answer to suspicion is hyper-vigilance. If I hold them accountable, then they can’t fool me. “They won’t take advantage of me again,” we say. And, yes, there is something to that.
But I want to make a daring assertion:
The antidote to suspicion is love.
Love is to be the defining characteristic of Christians. If I allow myself to spend too much time on social media or watch too much television, I’ll find myself slipping towards a deep sadness. There I’m regularly confronted with clips of people using the name of Jesus and yet behaving in absolutely unloving behavior. There’s the clip of the woman in the grocery store calling employees demons. There’s the clip of the Congressman admitting to calling another member of Congress a degrading profanity in front of others. And a seemingly never-ending stream of others.
In part, I think it is because we have forgotten what love truly is. Love is—in part—a full and complete acceptance of someone, no matter what they have done. But love is not one-dimensional. Love is not the tablecloth we unfurl to cover the scuffed and scarred table. Love has real shape, real substance, and a thickness. Love is the table itself, the place we invite others to sit, to encounter them in their glory, their goodness, their brokenness.
Instead of simple acceptance, love is a deep respect—a respect almost approaching reverence—for the image of God imprinted upon every face you encounter. The Trumpiest conservative is worthy of this respect. The snowflakiest liberal is worthy of this respect. The crazy uncle spouting tin-foil hat nuttiness is worthy of this respect. The stereotypical flamboyant gay cousin is worthy of this respect. Their ideas or behaviors may rub you the wrong way, but God has made them in His image, and He has declared them worthy of love. While we are busy cataloguing a list of reasons that certain people are beyond such respect, Jesus gently removes the list from our hands and reminds us that, “Love your neighbor,” transcends categorization.
Even further than respect, love is the desire to see the very best for each of these people. What is that “best”? For the Christian, wishing others the best is to wish that they would know the love of God and would be conformed into the likeness of Jesus. For those of us who are Christian, this means a daily process of transformation, of working to become more like Jesus. The theological term for this is Sanctification, but it is better understood simply as Maturity. As we grow into Jesus, we grow up. The world needs maturity; the world needs fully-formed people who live and behave as Jesus.
If you know people in this way, it is difficult to be suspicious.
This is love.
This is how Christians are to be distinguished from the world.
“By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”—John 13:35