One of my favorite movies is Marvin’s Room, starring Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Robert De Nero among others. It’s by no means a perfect film. It was obviously adapted from a stage play, and it consequently relies more on dialog than on visual storytelling. But what I like is what it has to say about the nature of love.

Streep plays Lee, a single mother with a rebellious teen son (DiCaprio) who visits her sister Bessie (Keaton) after leaving seventeen years earlier. She left Bessie to care for their bedridden father on her own, and it’s clear that she feels guilty but also still defiant about her decision. There’s a pivotal scene in the film where Lee and Bessie have been getting all this out in the open.

Bessie: Oh, Lee, I’ve been so lucky. I’ve been so lucky to have Dad and Ruth. I’ve had such love in my life. You know, I look back, and I’ve had such… such love.

Lee: They love you very much.

Bessie: No, that’s not what I mean. No, no… I mean that I love them. I’ve been so lucky to have been able to love someone so much.

Lee clearly thinks that Bessie is expressing appreciation for all the love she has received, but in fact she expresses her sense of good fortune at having had the opportunity to give love to her father and others in her family. This is a fundamental characteristic of love. It is other-centered and flourishes when it can do good for the beloved. In this sense, there is no self-seeking in love. It never considers the price it must pay nor asks whether the benefits are worth the costs.

Intelligent self-interest can look like love in a lot of ways. I can work diligently for the good of someone I care for, knowing that I will reap the rewards of a satisfying intimacy and robust friendship. I can be kind to others, knowing that doing so promotes civility and makes for a better, more just society. But there is something I can’t do from intelligent self-interest. I can’t lay down my life for someone else. This is why the apostle John wrote “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.” Real love is always self-sacrificial. It values the good of the beloved above its own.

People who have not experienced this kind of love often express puzzlement at it. For them it does not make sense that a person could be motivated to act in any way except in their own best interest. They may conclude that the beloved has some unknown hold over the lover to make them act contrary to their own interest, or they may imagine that the lover is simply too stupid to recognize what would be best for them, duped or brainwashed or foolish.

We have seen this puzzlement expressed by former President Donald Trump. On Memorial Day in 2017, while touring Arlington National Cemetery with his chief of staff, John F. Kelly, Trump remarked aloud referring to those who had fallen in battle. “I don’t get it. What’s in it for them?” For the fact is there was nothing in it for them. They died. Love of country is probably too abstract to account for the way young men risk their lives in war. It is not for their country but for their brothers in arms that they fight and sometimes die. Pity the man who does not understand this, whose conception of such love is as a weakness that leads people to act without benefit to themselves.

The opening chapters of Job depict Satan having this kind of belief. Satan attributes Job’s fear of God¹ to self-interest. It’s all tit for tat. “Does Job fear God for nothing,” Satan asks. “You’ve surrounded him with protection and blessed everything he does. Take all that away, and he will curse you to your face.” God has such confidence in Job’s love that he allows Satan to test it first with unimaginable losses of wealth and family and then with physical suffering. Despite Satan’s predictions, Job remains faithful to God and refuses to curse him or attribute evil to him. The one thing for which he gets God’s rebuke is for insisting that God owes him an explanation. Clearly Job’s love for God is not based on self-interest, yet Satan could not believe that.

C. S. Lewis makes a similar point in The Screwtape Letters. Screwtape, a senior devil writes letters of advice to his nephew, Wormwood, about ways to effectively tempt his “patient” into committing damnable sins. In one letter he says about God, to whom he refers as the Enemy, “he really loves the hairless bipeds He has created,” but retracts it in a later letter.

The truth is I slipped by mere carelessness into saying that the Enemy really loves humans. That, of course, is an impossibility, He is one being, they are distinct from Him. Their good cannot be His. All this talk about Love must be a disguise for something else—He must have some real motive for creating them and taking so much trouble about them. The reason one comes to talk as if He really had this impossible Love is our utter failure to find that real motive. What does He stand to make out of them?

Screwtape fails to understand that love is fundamentally other-centered. It is not self-seeking.

By contrast, God does not merely love us. John tells us that God is love. It is the essence of his nature. Every action he takes, every word he speaks, every event he allows to unfold is motivated by love. For God loved the world so much that he gave his uniquely begotten son, Jesus, so that anyone who puts their trust in him would not perish but have a life that never ends.

1. Fear of God in the Old Testament usually refers to reverential awe and respect. It does not mean terror or anxiety except to evildoers. In Job’s case, as his own defense makes clear, he regards the calamities and catastrophes that have befallen him as unwarranted, and wants to know why God would allow such suffering for someone who has always shown love and respect toward him. In this context Job’s fear of God is a sign of his love for God. ↩︎