I don't need 5 words to know you shouldn't eat the yellow snow.

I find myself growing weary of the church espousing that there are three forms of love, because there are three words we translate "love" present in scripture.  The modern Christian does not have the linguistic framework for that threefold distinction, and a weakness in translation should not be the basis for a teaching.  Sure.  The Inuit have five words for snow. The Inuit at some point felt they needed five words.  I certainly don't, and if I ever do, it will be the need for extra words that will drive me to learn new ones, not the simple presence of the words in another language.

So if we want to talk about our duty to love one another as the body of Christ, there's one word we have for that.  Love.  It's worth noting that the major verses that talk about love that we go back to again and again (Matt 22:34-40, John 13:33-35, 1 Cor 13, 1 John 4:7-21) use one word for Love.  This is the love we're supposed to have.  This is the love that shapes our Church.  We don't need whole books to tell us that this is different from sexual desire.

And as for John 21,  which uses one word for Jesus' love and another for Peter's love for Jesus,  John shows elsewhere that he is comfortable using the words interchangeably, both in describing how the Father loves the son, and describing how John was beloved by Jesus.  At any rate if there is a signficant difference between those two words, it is one debated by scholars and generally irrelevant to the layman and as it holds no relevance for the layman and arguable relevance for the scholar, can we please let it go?

Christ's command is simple, and we complicate it, because as a church we are allergic to simplicity. Does "Love one another" really need a book to explain it?