unconditional love
It sounds beautiful right? I will love you whatever you may do or say. But if we invest our unconditional love into an abusive person, they will take advantage and do and say whatever makes them feel good in the moment.
I have been musing about colonialism, and the idea that if a peaceful society meets one predicated on abusive principles, the one predicated on abusive principles is most likely to win becuase they are willing to do what it takes to be dominant. When the British came to Australia, they were willing to kill as many Indigenous people as it took to have possession of the land. Agreements were rigged to make sure the British always came out on top, and they have been rigging the system to benefit themselves - let’s be honest ourselves - ever since.
As far as I am aware, my German ancestors didn’t use guns but all the same they were happy to participate in a system that dispossesed the Kuarna people, even while some of them learnt the language and co-operated with them in small ways. They were accountable to the British system that was happy to dominate and use whatever means neccessary, and so complicit in the current ongoing impact on Indigenous people in these lands.
Whenever we are thinking about relationships, whether individual, (inter)national or anywhere in between, it is important to recognise that there will be those who are willing to do whatever it takes to dominate another. If we offer unconditional love to this person, they will take as much as possible and probably use fine sounding rhetoric to argue for why their behaviour is justified. So perhaps unconditional love is not a positive becuase it can be equated with unaccountability.
If this is true of human relationships, and we are made in the image of God, what might this mean for our reltionship with an all-powerful divine being?