Show Notes
After washing all of the disciple’s feet and offering Himself as body broken and blood shed, after Judas leaves to sell Him for thirty piece of silver, and after saying ‘Now is the Son of Man glorified,’ Jesus says: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another” (John 13:34).
How did He just love them?
If you are like most of us, you should be screaming, “How am I going to do that? How am I going to genuinely love my enemies because I want to love my enemies, be broken for them and bleed for them? How am I going to love in freedom? The harder I try to do that, the more I won’t do that, and the more I’ll resent Jesus for telling me to do that. How can I make myself Jesus?”
Perhaps the answer is rather simple and yet as complex as every relationship that you’ve ever had. For you can’t truly know another until you allow yourself to be known, and no one is born knowing this; it requires an intervention, a miracle. And on top of everything else, Satan works day and night to create diversions and triggers in you, so that you’re unwilling to even consider the answer.
I need to remind you of our last three messages.
In the first message, from John 12, we learned that “The commandment is Eternal Life (12:50),” that is “laying down your life (psyche) and taking it up again (10:18),” which is “to love as Jesus has loved us (15:12),” which Jesus just said is “a new commandment.” According to 1 John 2:7-8, it is “the Word that you heard, old and new (eternal)... which is true in Him and in You.”
In the first message, we asked, “What is the Commandment of the Father?” And the Answer is Jesus. In the second message, we asked the question of the Son: “What are you so ashamed of?”
The Commandment is Love, and sometimes I think I actually do love — and this must be who it is that I truly am. But the Commandment is also to Love like Jesus — but I don’t love like Jesus, and so I pretend to love like Jesus. That distance between who I actually am and who it is that I think I should be (and so pretend to be) is my false self — the shadow man, the imposter. And so, I protect who it is that I am, truly, with who it is that I am not. I trap myself in a prison of falsehood that I feel as shame and try to mitigate with accomplishments, good deeds — and of course, fashionable clothes.
The theology, psychology, and sociology of shame is profoundly complex and hard to understand, except that God has built it into our very bodies. We know how it feels.
In 1977, Ms. Rydberg sat me next to Susan Coleman in Masterpieces of American Literature at Heritage High. I immediately thanked God. I wanted to know Susan, but I didn’t really know if I wanted to know her, because I didn’t know her — I just knew that she appeared to be “good for food, a delight to the eyes, and to be desired to make me look cool.” And I wanted to be known by her, but I didn’t want to be rejected by her, so I worked really hard at impressing her with things that weren’t really me. I wore my jacket with all the ski tags, pretended to be cool, and tried to act like I didn’t care what she thought of me. I hid myself in a false self, terrified to be touched and yet longing to be touched by her. And she did the same.
To be honest, she caught my attention with her body, but she captured my heart with something far greater: the Spirit that God had placed within her. One day, after dating for about a year, I broke up with her. The following day, I went looking for her, for once I had lost her, I wanted her again —which only reveals the problem with me: I thought she was a commodity (The Bible calls this “playing the whore.”) I found her in a park by a tree and weeping over me. I just “beheld” her. She had allowed herself to be broken by me, and then I just broke for her. She captured me with the fluid that spilled from her broken heart. It was Life — her life, our life, my life.
After five more years, we became one
More from The Sanctuary Downtown / Relentless Love
“The mere idea of you, the longing here for you. You'll never know how slow the moments go till I'm near to you. I see your face in every flower, your eyes in stars above. It's just the thought of you, the very thought of you, my love.” My wife and I have spent a lot of time on romantic vacations listening to those words sung by Billie Holiday or Nat King Cole.
Sometime around 1968, I learned about germs in school. They can be found in dirt and most of all, in the very pinnacle of depravity: poop. So, I began to wash my hands... a lot. I washed and washed, but I am a producer of human excreta, and so is everyone I know. So, it felt as if I was never finished. I was driven to cleanliness and then to the doctor, for my hands were red, raw, cracked and bleeding — open wounds susceptible to germs! I had been better off with no knowledge of “germs” and “not germs.” The doctor looked at my hands and said, “Stop (Shabat in Hebrew)! Stop washing your hands.” They hurt like hell, but it was hard as hell to stop.
John 18:38-40: “Pilate said to [Jesus], ‘What is truth?’ After he had said this, he went back outside to the Jews and told them, ‘I find no guilt in him. But you have a custom that I should release one man for you at the Passover. So do you want me to release to you the King of the Jews?’ They cried out again, ‘Not this man, but Barabbas!’ Now Barabbas was a robber [lestes: a taker].”