Do You Love Me More Than These?

Today’s Gospel is a passage I love from the final chapter of John’s Gospel. After the resurrection, Jesus reveals himself to his disciples on the shore of Galilee. After eating breakfast with his friends, he asks Peter three times if Peter loves him. It is an exchange I have written and talked about before.

What always strikes me is the way Jesus’ question is phrased the first of the three times it appears in the Gospel: “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?”

The question I have whenever I hear or read the line is what did Jesus mean by “these”? I don’t think Jesus is asking Peter is he (Peter) loves him (Jesus) more than the other disciples love Jesus. But what is he asking?

Do you love more me more than you love your friends?

Do you love me more than you love your wife? And the rest of your family?

Do you love me more than you love your life as a fisherman? Do you love me more than than you love your own ambitions?

I think he means all and everything. Do you love me more than anything?

As we sit with the passage, I think the invitation is to ask ourselves a similar set of questions: Do I love Jesus more than I love my husband? More than I love my duaughter? More than I love my ministry? More than I love [fill in the blank]? We are invited here to reflect on how deep is our love for Christ – and on what competes with our love for him.

Do you love me more than these?

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Love Like God

In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples “As the Father loves me, so I also love you.” He then commands them to “love one another as I love you.”

If we put those two statements together, Jesus’ instruction is that we love like God loves. So it is worth thinking about what that means.

We can say a lot of things about God’s love. God loves unconditionally. God loves universally. God loves endlessly. That itself asks a lot of us: to love everyone as fully and unconditionally as God does.

But I don’t think even that fully capture it. The First Letter of John tells us that “God is love.” It doesn’t say God loves, but that God is love. That says to me that we are not asked simply to love.

Rather loving like God means being love. Not just showing love. Not just loving sometimes. But emptying ourselves of everything that is not love. That is a pretty tall order, but it is what Jesus asks of us.

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Putting Jesus’ Command Into Practice

Yesterday’s first Mass reading from Acts records what the priest who said Mass at St. Benedict’s Monastery yesterday afternoon called the first incident of the disciples putting into practice Jesus’ command to “love one another as I have loved you.”

Paul and Silas are beaten and imprisoned. As they pray to God, an earthquake shook the foundations of the jail, such that “all the doors flew open, and the chains of all were pulled loose.”

As the prest suggested in his homily, what happens next is not what you might expect. One would expect someone who had been unjustly beaten and imprisoned and who had been praying for release would have hightailed it out of there as soon as the door flew open. That is not what Paul did, however,

Paul’s concern was for the jailer, who upon waking and seeing the doors opened was about to kill himself, knowing he would be blamed for the escape of the prisoners. He begged the jailer not to harm himself, assuring him that the prisoners were still here. At that, the jailer “asked for a light and rushed in and, trembling with fear, he fell down before Paul and Silas. Then he brought them out and said, ‘Sirs, what must I do to be saved?’”

Paul gave up his own self-interest and stayed for the sake of the jailer. And, because Paul lived Jesus’ instruction to love as Jesus had loved, he then had the opportunity to further evangelize – through the efforts of Paul and Silas the jailer and his family were baptized. If we live Christ’s love, the priest reminded us, we will make disciple for Christ.

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Identified As Christ’s Disciples

Some clubs have T-shirts to identify them. Some groups have hats or pins or some other visible sign anyone can see to identify them.

Some Christians (myself included) wear a crucifix. It is a sign by which others might identify us a Christian.

But in today’s Gospel from John, Jesus makes it quite simple. It is not about the crucifix. There are no special clothes. No pins, badges. Nothing we wear, no tangible object at all.

Instead, having given his followers the “new commandment” – the commandment that they love one another as he has loved them, he says: “This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

It is hard to make it much plainer than that. As we used to sing, they will know we are Christians by our love. That is less a declarative statement than a challenge.

We ought ask ourselves every day, multiple times a day even: Do they know I am a Christian by my love? When people look at me do they see the love of which Christ spoke? And if the answer is no, what am I going to do about it?

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Treating Everyone Like I Was in Love With Them

Here is a thought experiment to start your day: What would happen if you treated everyone like you were in love with them?

Derek Tasker has a poem titled I Wonder. I had not heard the poem before someone read it this weekend near the end of the Spiritual Directors International conference.

Here is how Tasker puts the question:

I wonder what would happen if
I treated everyone like I was in love
with them, whether I like them or not
and whether they respond or not and no matter
what they say or do to me and even if I see
things in them which are ugly twisted petty
cruel vain deceitful indifferent, just accept
all that and turn my attention to some small
weak tender hidden part and keep my eyes on
that until it shines like a beam of light
like a bonfire I can warm my hands by and trust
it to burn away all the waste which is not
never was my business to meddle with.

Challenging, to be sure. But also incredibly exciting to wonder what it would be like if that was how we approached each other. To imagine how that might change them….change us…change the world.

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Changing the World with Love

Yesterday morning I attended the 53rd Minnesota Prayer Breakfast, a gathering patterned after the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. Seventeen hundred people gathered in person at the Minneapolis Hilton, joined via internet by thousands more around the state for communal fellowship and prayer around the theme Unity Through Love.

There were many moving aspects of the breakfast, not the least of which was the keynote address by Heather Flies, who began by suggesting the term love be reserved to signify our emotional commitment to the betterment of another, rather than using it to refer to our love of the Vikings, our favorite food, etc. More significantly, she spoke about the interrelationship between loving God and loving one another, making the point that the more we invest in deepening our relationship with God, the more natural will be the outflow of that love relationship into our love for one another.

Flies also spoke about Jesus as a model for our love for one another. Jesus, who noticed those unnoticed by others – the marginalized, the outcasts. Jesus, who stopped to interact with those he noticed, making them feel like they were the only person in the world. Jesus, who called people by name, letting them know they were worthy of being remembered. That is our model – noticing, interacting, calling by name.

Several speakers, including Flies, reflected on how the world would be changed if we truly actualized the command to love one another. And, as more than one observed, if Jesus could change the world with 12 apostles, imagine what he could do with a ballroom of 1700 people!

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My New Slippers

I have a new pair of slippers!

My friend Russ is a multi-talented and very generous person. One of the things he does in his spare time is make doll houses. Incredibly intricately-designed with wallpaper, molding etc. It takes him hundreds and hundreds of hours to make each one – and he has made many (no two alike) for his young relatives and children of friends. He delights in their delight when he gives the houses to them.

Another thing Russ makes is slippers – colorful, handknit, warm slippers. I admired his one day when I was visiting and Russ immediately said, “I’ll make you a pair.” And he did, with beautiful blues and purples.

When they were made, I was invited over to “felt” the slippers with Russ, which involved putting the slippers into a very hot washing machine until the knit both became “felted” and shrunk to the correct size of my feet. This required Russ standing at the washing machine and periodically pulling the slippers out so I could try them on. When they were correctly sized, he stuffed them with newspaper to dry them.

I share all of this, not as a “how-to” for readers who may wish to make slippers, but to share something of the time and energy Russ put into making my slippers for me.

What an amazing gift! The slippers feel wonderful and warm my feet. And I love the colors. But that is really only the secondary part of the gift. The real gift is the love and the labor of my friend. I wear my slippers knowing they are the work of the hands of someone who loves and cares for me. And that is an awfully nice feeling.

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The Word Was Made Brother

I mentioned in a post the other day that I’m reading Christian Salenson’s Christian de Cherge: A Theology of Hope. It is a book I will be sitting with for quite some time.

In his 1995 Holy Thursday homily, de Cherge used what is, for me, an extraordinarily powerful phrase, changing one word of a well-known line form the prologue of St. John’s Gospel. De Cherge preached:

The Word was made brother, the brother of Abel and also of Cain, the brother of Isaac but also of Ishmael, the brother of Joseph and of the eleven others who sold him into slavery, the brother of the plain and the brother of the mountain, the brother of Peter, of Judas, and of the Peter and the Judas within me.

The Word was made brother. What a powerful reminder of our universal fraternity! In a Lenten retreat that same year, de Cherge sayd that “in community we refer to the mountain dwellers, those who are called terrorists, as ‘the brothers of the mountain,’ and the armed forces we call ‘the brothers of the plan.’ It is a way of remaining in fraternity.”

This is one of those truths that we need to be constantly reminded of. If Jesus is my brother, he is also brother to every other person – those who commit horrendous atrocities as well as those who walk with love. And the brothers and sisters of my brother are my brothers and sisters – those who commit horrendous atrocities as well as those who walk with love.

De Cherge understood (better than many of us, given the conditions he lived under) that the challenges to fraternity are great. But he also understood that we are all of our brothers and sisters keepers and that love and prayer must be our way of being toward all.

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Who is my Enemy

The reflection at this week’s gathering of Weekly Manna at the law school was offered by my friend and colleague Chato Hazelbaker.

This week, Chato took as his starting point the portion of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus instructs us to love our enemies:

You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father.

Chato observed that these lines create an issue for us that they did not create for the people hearing Jesus teach. In Israel, even at the time of Jesus, there were clearly defined enemies of the Jewish people; there were real identifiable enemies of Israel. He contrasted that with the United States today – we are at war in Afghanistan, but our enemies are not the people of Afghanistan, but the Taliban, and even they are not easily identifiabe.

On a personal level, Chato indicated that he can’t think of anyone he would identify with the word “enemy.” People he gets irritated with, sure – but no enemies. (People have often made similar comments to me about the first of the meditations I present in Growing in Love and Wisdom, titled “Friend, Enemy, Stranger – to the effect that they have no enemies.)

So who are our enemies? Chato relayed an incident that occurred last weekend, when he went to watch his daughter play a JV basketball game at another school, that suggested how easily and subtly we can create “enemies,” people to whom it is difficult for us to extend love and compassion.

Chato admitted that he has an issue with privilege, with excessive income and the conspicuous consumption that goes along with it. The high school his daughter’s team played at was clearly a place of privilege. And that, almost immediately, caused him to view the people there in a negative light – as, well, enemies. It wasn’t anything they did – indeed, everyone he came across was quite nice and pleasant. But he had mentally put them in a box – people of the type I find distasteful because of their privilege.

I thought his story an instructive one, because, while the particulars vary, I think we do that sort of thing far too often. Out of our preconceptions, turn people into “enemies,” people who we in some way think are unworthy of our love. And doing so not only makes it difficult for us to love them, but allows us to feel justified in not doing so.

Jesus instruction is as important to us today as it was when he delivered the Sermon on the Mount. We are to love everyone – even those who, for whatever reason, are difficult for us to love. Jesus instruction continues

For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brother only, what is unusual about that? Do not the pagans do the same? So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.

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Not That We Have Loved God, But That He Loved Us

In today’s first Mass reading, which comes from the first Letter of St. John, we hear of a beautiful expression of God’s incredible love for us. We are exhorted to love one another because we are already loved by God, by the God who is love. And in the midst of John’s statement of the revelation of God’s love through the Incarnation is a very important reminder for us. It is not that we love God and are loved in return. Rather, God loved us first. “In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us.”

This is a truth we need to internalize deeply: God loved us first. God’s love is always there; it is the very ground of our existence. We don’t need to earn it so I can do nothing to gain any more of God’s love than I already possess. And there is nothing I can do to lose that love. God’s love is based on nothing and, therefore, is the most secure and basic fact on our lives.

Sadly, many people have, some where along the way, picked up the message that they are inadequate, not worthy of being loved. So they struggle, thinking the need to do something to justify being loved.

May we all pray for a deepening of our realization of God’s love. And may we grow in our security that we can never lose that love.

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