Unfulfilled Love, the Human Experience, and the Bible

Unfulfilled love is one of the most popular themes of all literature. If you take all of its permutations: unrequited love, forbidden love, and loneliness, you'll find that from the number of impassioned poets, authors, and the collective of alternative-rock angst, the amount of ink spilled on these topics is absolutely staggering. What would Romeo and Juliet be if they were not so restrained? Would the Arthurian legend be the same were it not for the forbidden affair of Guinevere and Lancelot? What would Alanis Morissette be if her relationships had worked out, and she got married and started a family? There is not a writer in the world who is not inspired by these type of traumatic experiences and feelings. It seems to be part of the human condition that we all share.

And yet, in the whole breadth of biblical history and literature, these topics barely show up on the radar.

To be sure, there are a few isolated instances, but even then the biblical writers don't really dwell on them.  Adam was lonely in the garden without a help-mate.  Jacob's wife Leah could not get her husband to love her no matter how many children she bore him. Potiphar's wife sought Jacob's son Joseph, and had him imprisoned when he would not lay with her. In Genesis 34, Jacob's daughter Dinah and the Gentile Shechem had a love affair that ended tragically because of familial differences. Not surprisingly, this rather brief episode was recently turned into a bestselling novel. There may be other stories I have missed, but on the whole, that's really about it.

The contrast between biblical and secular literature is so great that modern writers have taken it upon themselves to suppose such relationships in the bible.  You have writers such as Oscar Wilde supposing that the daughter of Herodias, whom he named Salome (in the play of the same name), wanted John the Baptist dead because of her unrequited love for him.  Some loose, modern interpretations of the gospel accounts will suppose that there was romance between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, which was either unfulfilled because of Jesus' calling, or fulfilled by marriage and children, according to Dan Brown. Those with a homosexual agenda will read that agenda into David's relationship with Jonathan, or Jesus' relationship with the apostle John, the disciple "whom Jesus loved."

So why is the scripture almost entirely devoid of such a universal part of the human condition? The scripture is meant to a certain extent to speak to the human condition.  The book of Hebrews tells us that Christ as our high priest can sympathize with our weaknesses.

I think the answer lies in that the bible does address these topics, but almost exclusively in the relationship that we have with God.  God loved Israel, but in the book of Hosea we find that Israel's unfaithfulness to God is likened to a harlot. Jeremiah 3 says that Israel has lived as a prostitute with many lovers, and that God has given her a certificate of divorce. And yet, God continues to implore that Israel return to her first love. Have you loved and lost? Has your love been unrequited? Have you been divorced? God has experienced this too. This human condition of unfulfilled love is merely a shadow of the unrequited love that God feels when his creation rebels against him.

If you are a Christian, you have been restored into a right relationship with God and you know what it is to truly love and be loved. But remember, we live in an age where there are still places in the world in which our love for Christ is forbidden, where if a former Muslim proclaims his love for Christ, he can be put to death.  Two millennia after Christ bore our sins to satisfy God's wrath, two millennia after Stephen became the first to die for his love of Christ, Christians are still being persecuted. Such will be the condition of Christians until Christ's return.

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