On this night, the night before he died, Jesus reminds us again that our commission, our call, and our command are to love. Too often, we can, like Simon Peter, get so caught up in daily tasks, in worrying about our worship, our plans, in the notion of how we think things should be going, that we can lose sight of Jesus’ model and instruction to love one another.
Loving one another is a challenge. Jesus’ command today to love one another is not about having good feelings for each other or being “nice.” The challenging call of Jesus means that we have to first learn to love ourselves — see ourselves as worthy of accepting, giving, and sharing love. Jesus not only spoke kind words and did great deeds—he comforted and healed and gave hope. Jesus embodied love. Jesus tells his disciples that they are to love one another “just as I have loved you.” By Jesus example, love means compassion, mercy, and difficult work – even sacrifice. As we see in today’s gospel, Jesus’ love is active in humble service and care. God is love. We are called to do the same. Our world cries out to see the face of Jesus, to walk the way of love, to experience a way of life that not only talks about love but actively shows and enacts love.
What does love look like? If you were to scroll through our collective photo album, what photos would demonstrate and teach how to love?
Faithful family photos or giving away food to strangers? Gardeners tilling the soil, nurses caring for unconscious or screaming patients, rehearsing musical notes or lines to perfection, praying for a friend, simply sitting and listening, feeding a pet, or cleaning trash from a local watershed. We love because God first loved us. This new commandment to love leads to bodily actions that are more than skin deep: changing diapers, cleaning up a disgusting messes, caring for the sick, holding the sign for justice, or writing a generous check.
In the book One Hundred Names for Love, Diane Ackerman writes that our brains are constantly being rewired through relationships. Our bodies remember our original bond with our mother, and every significant relationship with spouse, friend, or child shapes our brains. So it is no wonder a broken heart is felt all over physically in our bodies. Ackerman writes, “holding someone else’s hand is enough to subdue blood pressure, ease stress response, improve your health, and soften physical pain.”
More often than we know, our behaviors, patterns, and ways of acting are more than what we creatively inspire on our own. We are often taught and modeled behaviors by others. We learn empathy and compassion from what we have experienced. We learn how to care. We learn how to love.
Where do we learn our behaviors and actions, and how much of our lives are shaped by those who have modeled behaviors — for good or ill — for us? Ways in which we make food and eat, ways in which we cope with stress and prioritize work and study, and ways in which we show care and love.
Jesus models love in service, in meal sharing, in touch, and in sacrifice. Jesus care with his disciples is simply a picture of his whole ministry: touching lepers, healing diseases, washing feet, casting out demons, sharing a meal, and breaking the boundary even of death.
A woman named Brenda Peterson tells of a rash that broke out over her body when she was thirty-five in her book Nature and Other Mothers. The rash looked like chicken pox, yet the doctors didn’t know what it was. She tried remedy after remedy. Went from one medical center to another. Finally, her step-grandmother gave her a diagnosis: her skin needed to be touched. Her step-grandmother said: “Your body’s skin is harder working and more wide open than the human heart; it’s a sad thing to see how skin gets passed over, barely touched. Why, we pay so little mind to our skin, we might as well be living inside a foreign country.” In the next days and weeks, her step-grandmother proceeded to apply her own remedy of lotion and touching, massaging, and caressing her scarred skin. And soon the spots faded, and the skin became healthy again.
Might we allow Christ’s own body in this place to alter our brains, heal our hurts, and transform our lives? As Christ empties himself for us, we receive from his broken body the courage to love, to embrace vulnerability, to trust in mystery, and to treasure the beauty of our bodies, created and loved by God.
In an episode of the Moth Radio Hour, Alvin Lau tells the story “Sweet and Sour Meatballs.” He recalls imagining his last meal if he didn’t survive cancer. He describes the gap between imagining what he wished that meal could be and what he was able to eat during chemotherapy treatment. Facing death, he says, “I wasn’t hungry, even though I wanted to be.” As Jesus shares this final meal with his friends, does he want to eat? How different is this last meal from what he would have chosen? Alvin Lau also describes how different his first meal after completing chemo was from his imagined last meal. What he noticed most in that moment was, “how grateful I was to be hungry,” how “all that mattered was the chance to have a first meal . . . a meal [he] could point to [and] say, ‘That’s when I came back to life.’” Somehow it will become true again for us in these holy days that Jesus’ last meal becomes the meal where we come back to life, where we learn to hunger again for God’s love, justice, and wholeness.
Jesus’ love is also inclusive, not meant only for the inner circle. Taken in the context of Jesus’ teaching and ministry, his love and the love he has in mind for us is offered to all of humanity and, in fact, all of God’s creation. The world will know Jesus, and we will know God in learning the way of the heart — to love. To love as Jesus loved to challenge the death-dealing status quo. To love as Jesus loved is to take up the towel and wash feet. To love as Jesus loved is to share a meal even with the betrayer at hand. To love as Jesus loved is the way of giving, sacrifice, and the way of the cross.
