A New Commandment

Jesus Christ – detail from Deesis mosaic, Hagia Sophia, Istanbul (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

How beautiful is it that Jesus uses some of his precious final moments on earth to urge his disciples to love one another.

Just as he loved – loves – them.

But sometimes, for us, following that commandment seems almost impossible.

How can we live up to that when it’s so much easier to hold on to our petty differences? To name the one who would deny us, the one who betrays us. To blame those who we feel will abandon us in our hour of need.

Jesus did all those things, but what he calls us to emulate is his love. After all, he forgave them all in the end. And he did that out of love.

When we blame another person instead of loving and forgiving them, we inflict upon them again whatever injustice they’ve inflicted upon us.

We betray, deny, abandon them in their hour of need.

But Christ calls us to love one another. And a love like God’s looks beyond petty division and instead constantly, endlessly forgives.

Maybe when we learn how to do that we can finally say that we’ve raised our cross to follow Christ.

Unbounded Love

I don’t think I will ever forget the first time I held my niece,
Katherine Jean.
I had taken the 1am train to DC.
I arrived in the delivery room less than an hour after she was born.
And my brother immediately put her in my arms.
Cradling this gift of new and promise-filled life.
Gazing into her alert, but as yet unfocused eyes,
I found myself shaken,
Taken by overwhelming emotion.
By Love.
It was in that moment,
In that overwhelming wave of Love,
That I think I really began to get a glimpse of who God is.
If I, as a mere mortal,
A shadow of the Father in the story of the Prodigal,
Running across the fields of night
To greet my niece for the first time,
If I can feel so much unconditional love
For a child who isn’t even my own,
How much more must God,
In God’s perfection,
Love us.

In love / In God.

“I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.”

– Song of Songs: 6:3.

With spring in full force and classes finally winding to a close, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about my favorite book of the Hebrew Bible recently: Song of Songs.  For those of you unfamiliar with it, I encourage you to go read it. It is astoundingly beautiful and takes all of 20 minutes to read start to finish.

What I find interesting about Song of Songs is that it doesn’t mention God at all – at least not explicitly. Not once.  You might find yourself asking: so then why is it in the Bible at all?

There’s a long history of reading Song of Songs as an extended (and at times very elaborate) allegory explaining the relationship between God and Israel, or Christ and the Church.  But in my mind that does a great disservice to the work as a piece of literature and limits its scope as a piece of sacred text.

At the most basic level, Song of Songs is a series of folk love poems arranged as an exchange between two lovers: The Shulamite woman and her Beloved.  Their words are wildly romantic and often sexually explicit (no doubt a key factor in the move to read the work as allegorical).

But what happens if, rather than trying to reform Song of Songs into an elaborate religious allegory, we accept it for what it is and find God in that? If we allow ourselves to find God in the all-consuming love between these two all-too-human figures – to see God reflected in the transformative nature of their love. And from that reflect on the power of human love to reveal the love of God to us here in our lives.

To allow ourselves to find God in a love so strong that it empowers us to declare that we and our Beloved have become one. And in that, we see the face of God.

Parable

The Kingdom of God is like a man who has everything and loses it.
His job.
His home.
His friends.
His partner.
His faith.
Having lost status and livelihood, he turns to his children.
And they – who have nothing themselves – become his everything.
With nothing left to lose, he gives them his love.
Pours himself out for them.
Loves them unconditionally.
Asking nothing but to be loved in return.
And they do.
In this he finds purpose.
In this, he finds true happiness.
In this, he finds the face of God.
Boundless, changeless love.

This is what the kingdom of God looks like:
A man who loses his life and finds it again in love.

Finding God in Cupcakes.

Sometimes finding God is as easy as making a batch of cupcakes for someone you love.