Today’s Gospel ends with a command from Jesus: “Love one another”. It sounds pretty simple, until we realize that He actually means it in the deepest way. It’s not, “be nice to each other”, it’s LOVE each other. To love someone is to make ourselves vulnerable. This means that as hard as we may try, we have no control over whether or not they will love us back. The more people we love, the more we open ourselves to the possibility of pain. We need look no further than the example of Jesus: the one who created the world, became victim of the creation. Yet God continues to love us, and so we must love one another.
I sometimes find myself being stingy with my heart. I hate being hurt, and as a result I’m slow to love others. In his book “Turn My Mourning Into Dancing”, Henri Nouwen states that those who would try to guarantee their hearts will not be broken, will end up in a self-created hell. He quotes C.S. Lewis in “The Four Loves”:
To love at all is to be vulnerable…. If you want to make sure of keeping [your heart] intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken – it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable…. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from the danger of love is Hell.
How do we love those who leave us? How do we love those who hurt us or themselves? How do we love those who don’t want to be loved? The answer is both simple and complex: we love through Christ’s love for us.
Who is God specifically asking you to love?
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