The will and practice of being more like Jesus
Easter 5C | John 13:31-35
This morning, we find ourselves back in the evening before the Passion, when Jesus is sitting at a table with his closest followers, sharing their last supper together. It is from this table that he excuses himself, strips down, and washes their feet in an act of profound and improbable humility.
And it is in this act that his spirit is troubled and he speaks to his disciples with regret and sadness, for one of them will betray him. He doesn’t call out Judas by name, but by action, saying one who will eat with him is the betrayer, and then feeding Judas. And, without ceremony, Judas gets up and leaves the table to begin the cascade that will follow from this.
This is an important moment for making sense of what this humility and this betrayal have to do with Jesus. And when Jesus turns their attention to a “new commandment” which isn’t actually new, but in calling it new, he’s drawing newness into the moment, saying this, given this moment, is new. New to you now.
Betrayal, then love.
There’s a dance happening in the story that we give like ZERO attention to, I think. Or maybe, something south of ten percent, actually. People say “even Judas got fed” which means we see something important here, but I fear we aren’t really dealing with the energy of the moment, when Jesus washes the feet of disciples whose feet shouldn’t need cleaning, who warns of a betrayal that shouldn’t need to happen, to a feeding that speaks volumes more than they can hear, and command to love above all other things.
We get this sequence and then guess what Jesus does in the very next set of verses: predict Peter’s thrice denial.
Jesus is telling his closest followers that love is the most important thing and they can’t be bothered to think past their own junk. Their insecurities, hatreds, finances, whatever. They are distracted and discouraged. And they haven’t seen anything yet.
We get the problem, don’t we?
The problem of the love command because we really only want to love when we feel loving. Like when we love our families and we’re OK with that, but loving our enemies, heck no. Loving strangers, why? Loving the people who annoy us? No thanks.
Or else we do that thing where we make love into so abstract a thing that we can say we love people intellectually, just not show it. Or when we say to our family members, I love you to death, but I don’t like you right now — we want to make the idea of love be something up here in our minds in which we accept that we love a person while not in any way acting like love is on the table.
But what if none of that is in the ballpark? What if that is all excuse for treating people badly and avoiding Jesus’s command? What if the one non-negotiable thing for Jesus is literally the one thing we’re obsessed with negotiating?
“Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”
Honestly, the most picky excuse I’ve heard is perhaps the most dangerous of them all. That Jesus is talking about his followers loving each other here, rather than the more clearly inclusive vision we get from the synoptic gospels: loving God and neighbor as yourself. Pair this love-the-insiders interpretation with a insiders-get-saved-and-the-world-gets-condemned worldview and you’ll get to the Nazi excuse for genocide in just a few steps.
Given all of the excuses and desires to pick nits, maybe we should consider Jesus might actually mean love people. Period. Which means we need to confront the idea that most people just don’t want to.
Overcoming Fear
What this sequence throughout chapter 13 of John reveals is not animus or excuse, but confusion and fear. And I think we can probably relate to that.
When they gathered for the last supper, there was a wash basin that lay dry, towels unused. They didn’t even care for themselves. And Jesus loved them. So innocent and unworldly. And he wanted to care for them in a way none of them knew how to care for another person. He wanted to show them love and how to love — so they could know love and know how to love.
And his talk of love is sandwiched between predictions of betrayal — in Judas’s betrayal of Jesus physically and Peter’s spiritual betrayal.
Both of them loved Jesus, still loved him, I suspect, through it all, in spite of it all. These betrayals don’t reflect an absence of love, but the presence of fear distorting and mutating love into rejection and pain.
And here is where I invite us into the one thought experiment no Christian wants to consider, the one generations have tried so hard to avoid.
What to do with Judas?
Matthew’s gospel dispatches with Judas by suicide and Luke makes him run away and Mark just dispenses with him, but John surprisingly says nothing about the fate of Judas. But what we have is a last word about love as Judas departs. A command to the followers to love in the midst of betrayal. Love.
Connect the dots. Where is the hate and where must that be turned to love? Who must his followers seek to love as much as one another, that they could be known by that love to all those who met them? The ones who let Judas come back.
This is the image that comes to my mind every Ash Wednesday, when we begin the Season of Lent with the charge to learn how to love the Judases in our lives, to allow them to repent and return to our community.
Again, the evangelist writing this gospel doesn’t speak to this, though he does, later, refer to the twelve (not the eleven) gathering in the locked house.
The question isn’t whether they found a way to forgive Judas. It is about our willingness to love as Jesus commands us to love. Loving in a time of betrayal.
A Love Command
Matters of love, mercy, redemption, repentance, and forgiveness are rich with nuance and theological twists in thought. Which is why we aren’t called to simply not get mad, ever. Or that we are not allowed to have enemies — Jesus quite clearly assumes we will. The part is to figure out how to love them. And I think that is the most redeeming piece of it all. Because it doesn’t imply we start from that sense of love, but that we invariably start from the place of fear or frustration naturally and need to work our way to love.
And yet, and this is even more exciting to me, that over time, with practice, we can find ourselves loving earlier in the equation. That we needn’t only know frustration or pain or need reminding to love our neighbors because we learn how to love over time. And that one day, we’ll encounter an antagonist like Desmond Tutu did and maybe just laugh. Because love is so there, so collected and ready in the heart, that it becomes our first thought. Our gut reaction.
Psychologists call this cognitive behavioral therapy, in which we teach ourselves to respond in healthier ways to our environment. It proves the Jesus project was right. That Jesus himself was right. We can learn to love. By practicing love. Until it becomes second nature, so innate in us, that strangers will recognize us as Christlike. Not because we’re super awesome, even when we are, but because we are so quick to love that they say, “Impossible. I wish I could do that.”
Loving People
We start with loving our Judases and our Peters, my friends. Not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Because that is how it happens. We start by laughing at our discomfort and we welcome our “bad fortune” and we give thanks for the joy in our lives and the human contact that makes us feel alive. And we wash ourselves in the rain and sit quietly under a tree’s canopy, watching birds and squirrels dig into dirt and we feel loved because we’re here and get to witness the beauty of creation.
And we eat communion at the altar rail and we celebrate in the Great Hall and we talk and listen and share and commiserate and we plan and orchestrate and conspire to make this world a better place than we found it, than we find it now, and we love the people around us and we imagine loving those people who are messing things up mightily somehow.
We don’t have to know how yet. We just have to start with the reminder that we are supposed to figure that one out.
And it is not dependent on getting our way exactly, or that we need to like what they might do with their lives in the future, but it is about loving people enough to honor them in their humanity, to love what they might lock away and refuse to show the world, loving, not the brokenness, but the scared child inside of them that comes out through narcissistic desires for control. And we look at them with something far more than pity, something that may yet look like love.
We don’t have to be there yet. But that’s the path we’re on. And it is a path of glorious grace and true joy for all the good that is in creation. For it is all good, deep down.
And our command is to love, so let us become discoverers, explorers, seeking, not just the love we desire or the love we can offer, but the love that could be. Let us cultivate these skills to identify — and they are skills that we all can develop — that we might learn to love so easily, so freely, that we are known for our irrational love — a kind of love so attractive, so compelling, that people want to be around us, to know that same kind of love, to participate in something that can only be known as the grace of God.