Everybody knows what love is, right?
Love is what makes you sit up all night assembling the bicycle for your daughter’s birthday, or leave the board meeting early to make it to your son’s soccer game.
Is that the same thing as the love that makes your mouth go dry and your heart beat fast when you hear your beloved’s voice on the phone?
And is either one of those the same as the kind of love that sends you running home when life kicks you in the teeth?
C. S. Lewis draws a primary distinction between all the various kinds of loves by identifying “need-love” and “gift-love.“ There is no doubt at all that divine love is “gift-love” and not need-love. Think about it. Nobody needs our love less than God does. He lacks nothing. As the Psalmist says, "If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and all that is in it is mine.” [Ps 50:12] But we mortals are different. We are, as Plato said, children of poverty.
We are born helpless, and almost the first thing we discover is loneliness. You parents undoubtedly remember the separation anxiety that so many children go through when they are about a year old. We need other people. We need other people to touch us, to talk to us, to affirm not only our worth but in a way even our very existence. The first 6 months of a baby’s life, when moms who are lucky enough to be able to stay home and simply gaze into their eyes every waking moment, are giving their children a gift - the gift of knowing that they matter. They see their own existence reflected in their mother’s eyes. And it would be easy to disparage this kind of love. It comes from weakness, from emptiness. It’s a bad thing, in today’s over-psychologized, hyper-independent society to look down on anything that smacks of emotional neediness. And yet is it a bad thing to be needy?
Yes, if it is overdone, greedy, or desperate. But God created us to need one another. One of the very first thing we learn about ourselves is that “It is not good [to] be alone.” [Gen 2:18] That is why God made us in twos, so that we would have partners in life. But more than anything else, God made us needy so that we would know ourselves incomplete until we know him. We are closest to God when we are most conscious of our need for God.
And so if we are closest to God when we are the most in need of him, how can he possibly ask us to turn around and become people who love one another with divine love, Christ-like-love? How can Jesus say to Peter and the others, “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”
The answer to that is, he can’t. That is, he can say it, but he can’t expect it. And he doesn’t expect it. There are other things going on around this particular text, both before and after.
First of all, Jesus washes the disciples’ feet. And Peter objects, saying, “You will never wash my feet.” And Jesus has to set him straight on that score, saying, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” [Jn 13:8] Right after this Judas slips away to complete his planned betrayal. Next comes today’s text, with Jesus saying “Where I am going, you cannot come.” And then Peter says, “Lord, where are you going?” Jesus answered, “Where I am going, you cannot follow me now; but you will follow afterward.” Peter said to him, “Lord, why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.” [Jn 13:36-37]
What have we here? We have a picture of people loving Jesus as much as they are capable of loving anyone, and yet they still cannot follow in his footsteps. Not only can they not do what he is about to do, they don’t even know what love on that scale is.
What Jesus asks the disciples to do is beyond them. And it is beyond us, too. It is beyond ordinary human understanding, and it is beyond ordinary human capability.
We love, as John writes later, “because he first loved us.” [1 Jn 4:19]
But it isn’t just the example of Jesus’ death on our behalf that makes it possible for us to follow in his footsteps. It helps, of course. The first step in acquiring a new skill set is always just knowing what it is you’re supposed to be aiming at.
I learned how to water-ski when I was about 14, I think. How many of you have been water-skiing? All of you know what water-skiing is, don’t you? Now, imagine that you’d seen snow-skiing. You know what skis are. You know what water is. But the two just don’t go together. Because skiing goes downhill, and water is usually flat, so how would you get up enough speed to keep from sinking? Unless of course the wind is blowing or the waves are crashing or you’re looking at a white water river ... well, anyway, water plus skis just do not compute. But then someone shows you. There’s a boat and there’s a rope and ... well, you get the picture. My sister got the idea right away and was up on skis the first time she went out. But I just couldn’t get it. I fell in forwards, sidewards and backwards, and no amount of explanation seemed to be of any help at all. Until my cousin Howard put on a second pair of skis and came out with me, and actually held me up in the right position until I could actually feel how I was supposed to be balanced. Just seeing it wasn’t enough. I had to actually experience it before I could go out and do it myself. And I never fell again until - well, that’s another story.
But I can’t water-ski now, even though I know what water-skiing is and I know how I’m supposed to balance on the skis. I just don’t have the muscle strength any more. And that’s probably as close as I can get to explaining why what Jesus asked of the disciples was simply impossible.
The disciples simply didn’t know what kind of love he was talking about. They thought they did. But the fact that Peter objected to Jesus’ washing their feet shows that they really didn’t, not yet. Although they had seen it, they hadn’t fully understood and experienced it. And even if they had really grasped what Jesus was asking of them, they couldn’t do it, any more than Peter was actually able to follow through on his boast of following Jesus even to death.
That is why Jesus told them to wait for the Holy Spirit to come upon them before they went out and started building his church. Because it is only when we come close enough to God to receive the Holy Spirit that we become enabled to combine our need-love for God with God's gift-love for us and, through us, to others.
Because, you see, if we do not have our identity, our value, our hope for the future firmly grounded in the knowledge that God fully and completely gives us all that we could ask or imagine, we will always be looking to other people to meet our needs. And the love that Jesus asks us to give is love that still has something to give even when the person we are loving on Jesus’ behalf does not pay us back. It is the love of God, which never runs out, rather than our own love, which constantly needs to be replenished, which we are called to exhibit.
And many of us know that. We believe in God’s love, we have experienced it, we yearn to give it away as Jesus did. But it’s still not enough. Because left to our own devices, we are inclined to think that gift-love means soft love. It means sugar-daddy, open-handed, instant gratification love. And that is not so. The love Jesus had for his disciples, the love Jesus has for us, is a love that calls us to the high way, the hard way, the way of discipline and striving and growth.
A loving mother doesn’t carry her son everywhere, refusing to allow him to walk and run and climb and dare and even, sometimes, to let him fall. A loving father does not do his daughter’s homework to make sure she always gets A’s. Loving parents do not shield their children from the consequences of bad decisions - but instead help them to learn, and then pick them up and start them off again in the right direction. True love seeks the best for their child, not the easiest.
Many people believe that if God loves them, they should be given everything that they want, that they should never suffer hardship or pain or frustration. But that is not how love works. The writer to the Hebrews put it this way: “My child, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, or lose heart when you are punished by him; for the Lord disciplines those whom he loves, and chastises every child whom he accepts. Endure trials for the sake of discipline. God is treating you as children; for what child is there whom a parent does not discipline? If you do not have that discipline in which all children share, then you are illegitimate and not his children.” [He 12:5-8]
Even when we are not getting what we want right away, even when it seems as though God is far off, “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning.” [Lam 3:22-23]
And that is why love for God must always come before love for any earthly object of our affection - regardless of how noble, how pure, how selfless that love might seem to be. Because the best for your child, the best for your beloved, is to have their need-love turned from you to God. Because the best for your child, the best for your beloved, is in God’s hands, not yours. Although God chooses often to feed our needs through other people, although God gives us the privilege of being God’s representative to our children as they grow, it is only God who can take those we love and grow them into the people they are supposed to be, into people who can turn around and be channels of divine love in their turn.
And it is only when we put God first that we can love one another freely, forgivingly, without counting up who owes who what, and without holding it against one another when we fail to love perfectly, as we all will, as we all must. Because it is God who meets our need-love with his gift-love, so that we can meet other people’s needs with the love of God, gently encouraging them to draw close enough to him to receive it for themselves.
We cannot follow where Christ has led without the power of the Holy Spirit and the light of God’s word. But with those two added ingredients, the impossible that Jesus asked of his disciples that long ago day in Jerusalem becomes something we can begin to grasp, and begin to imitate, and begin to display, until people can see that we are the followers of a different way, servants and children of the one who is love itself.
