The Shape of Love

Imagine you tell your child, “I love you,” and then proceed to feed them only candy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You skip their doctor’s appointments because the waiting room is boring. You let them stay up until 3 a.m. watching whatever they want because saying “no” feels harsh. You never correct them, never guide them, never ask anything of them. Would anyone, looking at this arrangement, call it love?

We instinctively know the answer. Love that refuses to take shape in actual decisions, that floats above the messy particulars of daily life, that never says “this, not that”—such love is a sentiment at best and a self-deception at worst. Real love has contours. It looks like something. It walks a particular path.

Think of it like a line dance. You can stand on the sidelines all night, nodding your head and feeling the rhythm in your soul, but you aren’t actually dancing until your feet start moving to the steps. And if you’ve ever tried a line dance for the first time, you know the awkwardness of trying to find the rhythm—worrying about moving right when everyone else moves left, terrified of a collision. But the music gives the steps a purpose, and the crowd keeps you moving in sync until the choreography becomes second nature.

This is precisely what John wants to impress upon his readers when he writes: "And this is love, that we walk according to his commandments; this is the commandment just as you have heard it from the beginning—you must walk in it" (2 John 1:6).

 

A Verse That Folds Back On Itself

At first glance, this verse seems almost circular, like a snake catching its own tail. Love is walking in the commandments. The commandment is to walk in love. Round and round we go.

But this is not sloppy thinking. It is, rather, a careful theological knot that John ties on purpose. To understand it, we need to look at the Greek. The word translated “walk” is peripatōmen—a verb that literally means to walk around, to conduct one’s life, to make one’s way through the world. It is the same metaphor the rabbis used when they spoke of halakhah, the “walking” of Torah observance. Life is a journey, and the commandments are the path.

Notice too that John uses the word entolē (commandment) in two slightly different ways even within this verse. There is the plural—the commandments we walk according to—and then the singular commandment we have heard “from the beginning.” The plural points to the concrete, particular shape of obedience; the singular points to the unifying principle that animates them all, which the previous verse identifies: "that we love one another" (2 John 1:5).

In other words, John is saying: the many commandments are how the one commandment of love actually gets walked out. Love is not opposed to commandments. Love is what commandments are for.

 

Untangling A Modern Confusion

We live in a moment that finds this verse uncomfortable. Our culture tends to pit love and law against each other as enemies. Love is supposed to be spontaneous, free, expressive, accepting. Law is supposed to be rigid, confining, judgmental, cold. To suggest that love might wear the clothes of obedience strikes the modern ear as a contradiction—or worse, a manipulation.

But this opposition is foreign to the New Testament. Jesus himself ties love and commandment together in the strongest possible terms in the very passages that the elder of 2 John is clearly echoing: "If you love me, you will keep my commandments" (John 14:15). And again: "They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them" (John 14:21).

This is not a transactional arrangement, as if Jesus were saying, “Earn my love by jumping through these hoops.” It is rather a description of what love organically does. Love wants to please the beloved. Love delights in honoring what the beloved values. A husband who genuinely loves his wife does not chafe at the things that matter to her; he learns them, treasures them, builds his life around them—not because she demands it, but because love has its own gravity.

So when John writes that love is walking according to the commandments, he is not adding a burden to love. He is telling us what love actually looks like when you see it from above. Love is the soul; obedience is the body. Separate them, and you have a ghost or a corpse.

 

Truth As The Floor Under Love

The opening verses of 2 John provide a helpful foundation to all of this: ":to the elect lady and her children, whom I love in the truth, and not only I but also all who know the truth, because of the truth that abides in us and will be with us forever" (2 John 1:1-2). In just two verses, the word “truth” appears four times. The elder loves “in the truth.” Others love “because of the truth.” Truth “abides in us.”

This is not incidental. For John, love is never free-floating; it is rooted in truth, fed by truth, shaped by truth. Without truth, what we call love is merely affection, or attraction, or sentimentality, or even codependence.

With truth, love becomes something that can endure persecution, refuse compromise, and recognize what is actually good for the beloved even when the beloved does not.

This is why John is so concerned in the body of the letter with those who have departed from sound teaching.

He is not being a doctrinal Scrooge.

He understands that doctrine—what we believe about God, about Christ, about the human person—shapes the very contours of how we love.

Lose the truth that Jesus has come in the flesh, and you lose the truth that bodies matter, that the material world is good, that human persons are worth saving in their entirety. Lose those truths, and your love begins to deform, to chase phantoms, to bless things it should mourn and mourn things it should bless.

Truth is the floor under love. Obedience is the walking on that floor.

Take away the floor, and there is nowhere to walk. Refuse to walk, and the floor is wasted.

St. Teresa of Ávila put it like this in her Interior Castle: “The Lord does not look so much at the magnitude of anything we do as at the love with which we do it” (Interior Castle, VII, 4). And love, for her, was never abstract. It always looked like something specific: bearing this annoying sister, fulfilling this tedious duty, embracing this unwanted cross.

This is what John is pointing toward. He is saving us from a love that flatters itself with grand sentiments while never bending to actual obedience.

He is also saving us from an obedience that prides itself on rule-keeping while harboring no real love.

Each without the other becomes a counterfeit. Together, they become the Christian life.

 

Walking, Not Sprinting

There is one more nuance worth noticing. The verb “walk” suggests not a heroic leap but a steady, ordinary pace. We are not commanded to vault over the commandments in some spectacular display. We are asked to walk in them. One step. Then another. Then another.

This is, frankly, good news for those of us who feel daunted by the call to love.

We do not have to become saints by next Tuesday.

We do not have to feel an overwhelming surge of charity toward our difficult neighbor before we can act.

We only have to take the next step. 

To pick up the phone. To bite back the cutting word. To show up at the bedside. To pray for the one who wounded us. To keep the small promise. To say “yes” to the duty in front of us.

Love walks. It does not need to fly. And in the walking, day after day, year after year, something is being formed in us that will, in the end, be unmistakable as the very life of Christ.

 

Practical Steps For The Week Ahead

How might we let this verse shape the coming days?

First, examine where you have separated love from obedience in your own life. Are there commandments of Christ you have softened or set aside because they felt unloving—to yourself or to others? Have you called something “love” that the gospel would not recognize? Conversely, are there places where you have kept the rules but lost the heart, where your obedience has hardened into self-righteousness rather than flowing from love?

Second, choose one concrete commandment of Christ this week and walk in it deliberately. Perhaps it is the command to forgive. Perhaps it is the command to give alms in secret. Perhaps it is the command to refrain from anxious words about tomorrow. We should always hope to follow all His commandments, but sometimes we get overwhelmed by the "all" and focus on none of them. Try placing a special intention on one or them, practice it like a single step, and add one to it next week. Do not try to do everything at once. Pick one path and walk it.

Third, ground your love in truth by spending time with Scripture this week, especially the Gospel of John. Let Christ himself form your understanding of what love looks like. Our intuitions about love are often more shaped by movies and music than by the gospel; only sustained immersion in the truth of Christ can reform them.

Fourth, in your prayer, ask for the grace to love what God commands. This is the deepest secret. Obedience is hardest when we experience it as external. It becomes joy when our wills are reshaped to desire what God desires. This is a grace, not an achievement. Ask for it. Keep asking.

Finally, be patient with the walking. You will stumble. You will sometimes wander off the path. The point is not to never fall but to keep getting up and continuing the journey. The commandments are not a test you pass or fail. They are a road, and the road leads home.

This tiny verse, in one of the shorted books of the Bible, can be easily skipped in a hurried reading. But it turns out to contain the architecture of the whole Christian life. Love and truth, commandment and walking, the One who calls and the ones who answer. All held together in a beautiful dance. To learn to dance is a lot like learning to walk. At first, it may be arduous, difficult, we might not understand it. We might move the wrong way.

I remember a time I attempted to learn a line dance. I've never been good at it. My wife thinks I might be among the worst dancers on the planet. She's probably not wrong.

But I was so focused on the right moves, I didn't hear the music. I was so worried about my awkwardness, or that I'd move to the right when everyone else was moving left, that it wasn't any fun at all.

I wanted to quit. To say, "this is dumb," and forget it. To go grab a cup of punch, and stand awkwardly on the outside, nodding along with the music. But I knew that wouldn't give me much joy... and I could see the joy radiating on the faces of those who'd learned the dance, who'd given themselves over to it.

It usually starts that way. The good thing is, if you are in the middle of a dance like that, you are surrounded by others who know all the right steps. When you start to move right, and realize you're going the wrong direction, you can quickly correct before you collide with your neighbor. You might trip up a little, lose the rhythm for a second, but then having learned the right move, you can commit it to the dance, and then take the next step.

Before long, the moves become second-nature. You start to hear the music again. And then, all at once, joy emerges because the music and the moves are perfectly aligned. The Christian walk can feel that way. It might not be joyful right away, because you're learning the steps. But if there wasn't any music, if there wasn't love grounded in truth, the moves wouldn't make any sense, there'd be nothing to guide the rhythm.

So dance with others. Follow their lead, if you do not know all the steps. And as you learn, open your ears more and more to the music that is, ultimately, what it's all about. We dance in love. We love through dance. And when you the two are in sync, joy is what follows.

To walk in love, to dance in it, to follow the rhythm in truth, is to discover, slowly, that we were made for this all along.