Love Instead of Contempt

Matthew 1:18-25

Love is a word that menas five million different things to five million different people. We watch countless movies about it. We talk about it at wedding ceremonies. We say it casually to one another. We eat chocolates on Valentines Day. Love is so ubiquitous, I think it can be easy for us to make it meaningless. We can substitute a lot of things for it. We can claim a lot of things are it, even if they aren’t.

That doesn’t change how Love is not only something holy and sacred—something we yearn for deeply—it is also something we need. Children who don’t receive physical touch and affective can develop severe psycho-social disorders. It can even lead to a general “failure to thrive,” where a child does not take in the nutrients they need to develop properly. Something in us withers or becomes when we do not receive love.

But what is it? It isn’t a Valentine’s Day card. It isn’t just a kiss on the lips. It isn’t just kind words.

Love is sacrificial. Love gets tested by our willingness to give of ourselves on behalf of someone else. And the quickest example of this that hits closest to home for me is the love parents have for children. Because that is a sacrifice. Parents give up massive chunks of their lives for a large period of time to raise a child. And it is becuase parents love their children. Something is seriously wrong when they don’t, or can’t.

But that is an easy example. It gets dicier in marriage and dating relationships. What does love look like there? How do you know when things have shifted from affection to something deeper? It is still based on sacrifice. Love shows up in a relationship when the people involved start offering up themselves to the other person. When parts of one another’s life get exchanged. When someone takes time off work to care for the other who is sick. When one person in the relationship makes space for the other person to heal, or work through challenges. Love looks like a lot of things. But at its core is an act of sacrifice, large or small.

And that is love when it shows up in dating or marriage, but what about platonic relationships? What about the love we Christians are expected to have for our enemies? Love is still something sacrificial.


At the end of the day, no matter the intensity or type of relationship, Love requires something of us. And the opposite of Love could be considered hate, but if I have learned anything in marriage counseling, I would say that contempt is more dangerous than hate when it comes to Love. Where hate might still lead us to believe someone is worth the time and energy to hate. Hate can be healed. Contempt, on the other hand, is a deeply entrenched feeling or belief that someone or something is of no value at all. When you get to feelings of contempt for your spouse in a marriage, it is generally too late to heal what has been broken.

And contempt isn’t just a sneering malicious feeling. Sometimes contempt is passive. Sometimes contempt is systemic. We see contempt in societies where someone becomes automatically disenfranchised because of who they are. Contempt exists from the state of Israel and its ministers for the people of Palestine, whom they deem worthy of starvation and genocide and have no willingness to consider a future where they live in the land that has been theirs far longer than the state of Israel has existed.

Contempt can happen by accident, and it can happen by non action. And contempt is the opposite of Love, which at the very least demands from us gut wrenching compassion when our neighbors, no matter who they are, experience oppression, violence, or worse. God forbid we give way to a passive contempt instead.

The Christmas story could have resulted in Joseph buying into the cultural contempt that existed for women who had children outside of wedlock. In Matthew 1, Joseph was faced with a dilemma of learning his wife was pregnant with a child that was not his. Initially he decided to “divorce her quietly,” not actively contemptuous but still buying into the cultural contempt that existed, but chose Love instead at the urging of an angel in a dream. That is still love, just because a dream urged him to do it doesn’t make his choice to follow through any less important. Joseph loved Mary. He faced the possibility of deep shame rather than do what anyone else would have done. And that resulted in the redemption of humanity. How tragic things would have been had Joseph given way to the socially acceptable form of contempt that Mary faced bearing the Son of God in her body!

Love requires something of us while contempt devours us from within.