Jesus and his disciples are sitting around the Passover table. Yet again he has taken his closest friends by surprise, kneeling down to wash their feet. Finished, he takes his place again.
“Love one another as I have loved you,” he says.*
It’s hard enough to love people the established ways: to put food on the table for your children, to show your spouse affection, to remember to call a friend who is going through a rough time. But loving people the way Jesus loved – well, there’s no playbook for that. Calling Peter out of the boat. Letting Thomas touch his wounds. Staying in a Samaritan village. Telling the rich young man to sell all he had. Weeping together with Mary and Martha. Washing the dusty feet of the men who would deny and betray him.
To love as Jesus loves takes imagination. It depends on vision, on seeing clearly what is but also what could be, seeing not just who others are but who they want to be. And loving as Jesus loves takes courage: it is so risky to share ourselves, to welcome others in, to call them out. There are no simple rules to follow. The way that Jesus loved was so wild, so unpredictable.
Wild, unpredictable: these are the adjectives that kept coming to mind, and with them, the image of Aslan from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I know that C.S. Lewis has been criticized, rightly, for the racism and misogyny that appear in some of the Narnia novels as well as his other writings. But when it comes to Aslan, the great Lion that Lewis created in the image of Jesus, there’s something that continues to capture my imagination. He is both fierce and tender, playful and powerful; even as the Pevensie children come to know and love Aslan, they never quite know what to expect. Yet the time they spend with Aslan begins to change the way they interact with each other, and the other creatures of Narnia.
Are we brave enough to love and be loved this way? To set aside expectations about the “right way” to be a good a friend, a good partner, a good parent, a good citizen? Can we love without rules, beholden only to the Holy Spirit?
–Erica Lloyd, Seekers Church
