As
modern society moves toward redefining marriage to include romantic attachments
between members of the same sex, the rallying cry of the redefiners is
“tolerance” and “acceptance.” One should
tolerate everyone and everything. One
should accept everyone as they are, not as they should be; those who fail to be
tolerant and accepting, who obey God rather than man, are hateful, bigots, fit
only to be attacked and demonized.
Tolerance is perhaps the highest value of a secular society, but not,
however, of a divine one.
When
God walked the earth two thousand years ago, a member of the intellectual
elite, wishing to test Him asked Him what was the greatest commandment. Our Lord replied, Love the
Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your
strength and with all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself (Luke
10:27). Later, at His last meal with his
disciples before His death and Resurrection, He gave them a last command
saying,
A
new commandment I give unto you: That you love one another, as I have loved
you, that you also love one another. By this shall all men know that you
are my disciples, if you have love one for another (John 13:34-35).
On
multiple occasions Our Lord commanded love, but never once did He command
tolerance. Never did he command his
disciples, “tolerate others as I have tolerated you.” Never did He tell a sinner He forgave, “I
accept you as you are.” He never merely accepted
a person as that person was, but sent
that person away as he should be. Recognizing that a person should be a certain
way implied that the person as he was, was unacceptable. But though a person’s actions might be
unacceptable and intolerable, that person himself was still lovable. Hence Our Lord could defend the woman caught
in adultery from her attackers, but also tell her to “go and sin no more.”
Tolerance,
as a former professor once told me, is simply the other face of
indifference. And Elie Weisel,
concentration camp survivor and author of Night,
once remarked that the oppossite of love is not hatred, but indifference. Mere tolerance or acceptance is not simply a
lesser form of love, but its oppossite.
No one who loves anyone ever merely tolerates them. A wife who did not love her husband very much
might tolerate his alcoholism (at least until it became inconvenient to
her). She might accept him as he was and
not bother trying to change him for the better.
In such a case though, we should have to conclude the woman’s tolerance
and acceptance indicated not the greatness of her love for her husband, but its
smallness.
Real
love may even entail a significant degree of intolerance and unnacceptance,
because love always entails truth. In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis said that one cannot love a lie, he cannot love a thing
that is not. Hence love entails truth
and truth always entails not only the recognition of what is, but what ought to be. It may entail recognizing that a thing that
is, should not be. Thus a woman’s love
for her husband will entail recognition of what he should be and hence an
unacceptance of him as he is and an intolerance of his alcoholism. It will be so even if her husband protests
about her intolerance, insists that he is happy as he is, and insists that his
wife accept him as he is.
Jesus
never merely tolerated anyone. He loved them. Not the love of a modern secular world that
is only sentiment, or romantic attachment,
or a sort of weak tolerance or mere acceptance. Love is not tolerance. It is something both higher and holier, more
terrible and more splendid. It is a
cross and a crown of thorns, a battle and a fight, but not tolerance and not
necessarily acceptance.
