Vespers Reflection

Yesterday, I had the privilege of giving the reflection during SOT vespers. This is the reflection I gave, the skeleton of which was my Christmas letter last year.

The passage was John 13:33-38.

Thanks to J. & L. for all their help.

A few years ago I was going through a really terrible break-up. I’m sure many of us have had them—the kind where you emerge three months later only to realize that you’ve inadvertently listened to every album The Cure has ever made, you’ve gained or lost ten pounds, and the Thai restaurant up the street knows not only your name, but your credit card number and order as well. In the middle of this intense bout of self-pity, I called a close friend. As soon as she picked up the phone I burst into tears. “I am completely and utterly unlovable, and I am going to die old and alone, crushed under a stack of 1st edition Tolkien and Arthur Conan Doyle, and feral cats are going to get into my house and eat me.”

After about 20 seconds of silence she said, “Kel, let’s be honest here. You’re going to grad school for THEOLOGY. You’re never going to be able to afford 1st editions. It’ll be crushed to death under stacks of newspapers.” I had forgotten that above all else, this woman is a pragmatist, and not necessarily the one to turn to for comfort. A few days later, I picked up my phone to discover a text message from her. It said simply, “Love is risky.” My heart jumped into my throat. More than my other friends’ insistence that the guy was a jerk and that I was better off, more than my mother’s concerned phone calls or my roommate’s homemade soup, these words cut through the blur of pain and frustration and abandonment I was feeling. Love is Risky.

Never has the riskiness of love been as apparent as it has become during my time here at the

School of Theology. As anyone who has sat next to me for more than five minutes could probably tell you, I am a Christocentric theologian, probably to a fault. But that Christocentricsm is a result of my deep appreciation for the riskiness of God’s love for the world, particularly as we know it through the Incarnation, passion, death, and resurrection of Christ. While here, I think constantly about the riskiness of the Incarnation. I think about the beauty and—frankly—terror of a God who loved the world enough to say "yes" to torture and death. It seems to me that regardless of Christ’s foreknowledge of his glorification (upon which John insists) the Incarnation was risky. But it was a risk made out of the most perfect kind of Love. A love that calculates the messiness and pain and frustration of such a relationship and, having weighed all of these factors says: “I cannot help but love you.”

This, I think, is precisely what Christ is calling his apostles to in this passage from John. To love one another as Christ loves us is no small task—it is a radical self-gift—an act of complete and utter trust in the other person. We say: “Here I am—in my moments of transcendence and of brokenness. Here I am when I am full of excitement and life; here I am when I am stupid and tired and irritable.” And after giving the other that gift, we say: “I am willing to show you these moments and trust that you will love me. And I will do my best to love you both in transcendence and brokenness.” We say this with the acknowledgement that failure is not just possible but probably both for the lover and the beloved. This is a love for which we are made, a point Christ makes very clear in this gospel. Yet, while we are made for this kind of love, its riskiness is frightening—frightening enough that Peter runs away from it and its consequences—but this love is so encompassing that it accepts and envelopes us even in our inability to replicate it in our lives.

Someone close to me brought this all into perspective recently. We were talking about this passage in John and he said, “Kelly, love isn’t just an emotion. It’s a verb. Perhaps that’s Peter’s problem. He understands Christ’s love as an emotion—not as an action.” This is precisely the point of this Johannine passage. Christ’s love is an action, a pouring forth into the world which his disciples are initially incapable of understanding. They get the emotion of Love, but not the action. This is the riskiness of Christian love—of Christ’s love in this particular passage. Love is an action in the world—an action to which there must be an answer and an answer of which we are unsure when we love. And this lack of surety is exactly what is most beautiful about Christ’s injunction to love one another as he has loved us. It is as though in that one sentence he tells us—this is terrifying, and it’s going to hurt, and you don’t know where it’s going to take you—Love is Risky. But if you can embrace all of that, all of the frustration and pain and messiness, if you can somehow manage to do that, then you will finally begin to understand what it means to love one another as I have loved you.