When we say love must be courageous, we often think of how love must be ready to sacrifice. To leap in front of the bullet, to go down with the ship so others don’t, to bear the shame and punishment of another. That requires courage.
When we say that love must be courageous, we often think of how we must be ready for those we love to hurt us. Love requires trust, which means opening ourselves to harm from another. To love is to lay your heart out in its most vulnerable form, in all its nakedness with shadows of daggers slanting over it.
Love also requires courage of another kind: the courage to refuse sin.
In our world of romance movies, romantic comedies, and romance novels, that part of love doesn’t always make appearances. A woman committing adultery to her husband to be with her true love from her childhood is portrayed as swoony. Love triangles where a girl leads on two (or more) guys are displayed as stories of passionate, powerful love. We cheer on the guy doing everything he can to sabotage his crush’s relationship because he and his crush truly belong together.
But what if these are the exact opposite of true love? Love is all that is good, beautiful, and right. Love is anything but wickedness and evil.
In 1847, Charlotte Brontë wrote a love story under a pseudonym (because what did women know about writing good stories). She wrote it as the memoir of a fictional woman named Jane Eyre — a girl who grows up parentless, is adopted by an abusive aunt, and sent away to a boarding school that causes further abuse. While many of Jane’s heartstrings are rent over her childhood, her sufferings form courage rather than bitterness and cynicism.
Jane takes up a job as a governess for the daughter of a wealthy, single man named Mr. Rochester. As time passes in the old, lonely manor, Jane begins to fall in love with him — and he, her. Through some questionable and odd ways of winning a woman’s heart, Mr. Rochester and Jane finally confess their love for one another and make plans for a beautiful wedding and life together.
Yet not all is as it seems. When the pastor says the ever-known, “Does anyone object to this marriage?” someone actually does: the brother of the mad woman Mr. Rochester is married to and keeps in his attic.
That evening, Jane sits in a darkened room staring at the flickering fireplace. As her heart rends more than it ever has, Rochester finds her. He falls before her as a broken man and pleads that she runs away with him — leave, with his wealth, to a far off country where they can be together and no one can stop them.
Probably any modern love story would end here as the couple falls into each other’s arms, grabs a suitcase, and takes the next train to an exotic paradise. Jane is too courageous for that.
She loves Rochester and God too much to do what is easy. She clutches the back of a chair, her whole self shuddering, as Mr. Rochester proclaims his love and undying affection and kisses her forehead and cheeks. “Now, Jane, do you mean it now?” Rochester whispers against her skin. “I do,” she replies.
“Would it be wicked to love me, Jane?” Rochester pleads. Jane replies, “It would be to obey you.”
Though every bit of Jane’s heart cries out to Rochester, to cling to him as he clings to her, she reasons with her heart: If laws are laws when I am sane, they must be laws when I am mad with love.
Even Rochester sees it in this broken yet resolute woman. As he grips her in his arms so that she could not flee, he says,
I could bend her with my finger and thumb: and what good would it do if I bent, if I uptore, if I crushed her? Consider that eye: consider the resolute, wild, free thing looking out of it, defying me, with more than courage—with a stern triumph. Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at it—the savage, beautiful creature! If I tear, if I rend the slight prison, my outrage will only let the captive loose. Conqueror I might be of the house; but the inmate would escape to heaven before I could call myself possessor of its clay dwelling-place. And it is you, spirit—with will and energy, and virtue and purity—that I want: not alone your brittle frame.
Though Jane is frail physically and Rochester could overpower her with the strength of his arms, he knows he could never conquer her courageous soul.
In this moment, Jane embodies 1 Corinthians 13: “Love … does not act disgracefully, it does not seek its own benefit … it does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth” (vv. 5b, 6).
Though Jane longs to run away with Mr. Rochester and be his beloved, she chooses what is true and righteous. She chooses to walk in the light, though love seems to call from darkness. She knows true love walks in the brightness of day.
John wrote to the suffering believers,
Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world. The world is passing away and also its lusts; but the one who does the will of God continues to live forever”(1 John 2:15–17).
Rochester calls Jane to the way of the world; to forgo what is right and choose him instead.
True love abandons the way of the world and chooses the way of Christ. Love may look different in the complexities of life after the fall — you may flee from the one you love who asks you to sin, as Jane does, or you may flee from being sinned against to prevent the one you love from harming another image bearer. But love will always, always choose what is true and good and light.