Agape Love as "brave compassion"

It is unusually difficult to be compassionate when one is also under attack.

I mean not just when enemy bullets are winging your way but also when your entire society, including all your friends and family around you, is seemingly opposing your compassion.

Being brave and compassionate under fire , when your nation expects all soldiers to be so , certainly requires a lot of physical bravery (after all , most VC recipients died while earning it).

But it rarely requires any real moral courage.

By contrast , opposing your own society to display compassion doesn't always require physical bravery - but it certainly requires a great deal of moral courage.

Henry Dawson's wartime compassion meant both having the physical courage to accept that his actions would only hasten his death from Myasthenia Gravis and the moral courage to deal with hostility from his colleagues, employer and national government.

This is why I think it useful to contrast Dawson's WWII Agape valour with the Agape valour he and fellow Nova Scotian Philip Bent VC displayed in WWI...

Agape compassion is easy - but Agape valour is very very hard

Agape love is not just 'compassion' - it is selfless limitless compassion for others (including enemies) even onto death.

By definition it seems to be more about limitlessness (of selflessness onto death) than mere normal (limited) expressions of compassion and mere normal (limited) acts of compassion.

Demands that we display agape love thus becomes one of Christ's notorious 'hard' sayings.

Despite this, the term 'agape' is most commonly found coupled with bog ordinary 'compassion' and very, very rarely with concepts like 'valour' (courage and bravery under conditions of likely death).

Valour seems to have become too associated with the wounded soldier awarded a VC for picking up a gun and going off by himself under heavy fire to kill a group of enemy machine gunners.

Valour seems to confined to an extraordinary activity redolent of offensive , aggressive , violent warfare.

The only military valour most of us like to applaud is that of the man who leaps on a live grenade, dying to save the life of his comrades.

Or even better, someone who goes back time and time again into a burning plane to pull out his friends - only to die himself when the plane explodes.

Brave onto death while saving others.

But true Agape valour - in Christ's sense of the term - might actually only fully apply to that rare soldier who dies trying to pull enemy soldiers out of their burning vehicle.

But no nation ever gives out medals for that --- and more's the pity.....