The Commandment to Love

A priest I knew once said some parishioners told him that their five year old little girl came home after church one Sunday and complained—“All the priest does is say the same thing over and over. Blah blah blah love, blah blah blah love.”
Well Maundy Thursday is the reason that preachers have sermons that harp on a single theme of love—the new commandment of Christ to the disciples, to love others as he has loved them.
To be servants to each other, to wash each others’ feet. To love not as masters but as slaves.
To love as Christ has loved us.
The immensity of Christ’s love for us makes us wonder whether we can even try to attain to such a thing—to make Christ’s model our own way of loving.
For Christ’s love was all verb.
While we want love to be poems, flowers and cards of sympathy, or the whispering of sweet nothings, Christ had no hearts and flowers and sentiment.
Christ’s love was rooted in his body.
His love was making mud on a blind man’s eyes;
Telling a woman at a well about her life;
Weeping with Mary and Martha;
commanding in a shout for Lazarus to live.

His love was dirty and defiled by disease, distemper, death. His love was measured in the number of dusty, dirty feet gently put under water. His love was eating and drinking with people we wouldn’t want to bring home to dinner.
His love is leaving our safe places behind.
I believe that our loving must be startled out of our reverie, away from our safe places and made clear to the world. Because, when we pay attention to all the ways the world is crying out for the acts of love shone to us in Christ, we begin to want to love our world as Christ loved it.
Coming out of complacency that nothing can be done, or that the world needs so much more love than we can give, we begin to see that unless we start where we are, the world will die without love.
Our nooks and crannies are our stating places, just like Jesus’s world of lepers and the lame and women coming to wells was his world. Jesus did not heal all people in his world but he made it possible that everywhere his followers went, love would be spread in a geometric progression. Each person loving in the small corners they inhabit, multiplied, become all the world receiving the love of Christ.
The arithmetic of Christ’s love is bigger than any one of us. It starts with small steps, with awareness of how to love in the minute I find myself, the place I find myself, with the people with whom I find myself.
The spread of divine love is not safe, it is risky. It is stepping into someone’s grief and loss, or away from the computer in face to face encounter. It can be as mundane as a beer with a young adult, or as exotic as a mission trip to a place that may give us malaria.
This kind of loving is always personal, as Christ was personal.
This kind of loving is imbued with divine power, as Christ was imbued with divine power.
This kind of loving is not a choice. Jesus did not say, maybe you will love if you want to be my follower, but you must love as I have loved you.
This kind of loving is the mark of Christians. By this they will know you are my disciples.
As we ponder the commandment to love as Christ has loved us, we know that we would not be given this work to do without God’s power behind it. We know we can love, because Christ loved us. We know we can start today because we are loved today. We know we can take our love to dark and lonely places because we have been loved in our own dark and lonely places. We know that all the people we are asked to love are merely our own selves, who have already been loved.
This knowledge of the love of Christ is what propels us to love the world. Christ so loved us that we can do no other than love in his holy name.
Living the love that Christ asked us to live.
Doing the loving that Christ lived.

We know we are living love like a verb when our lives are not just talk. When we are not just blah, blah, blah love, but doing love, love, love, love.