What do you say when it's all over?
When the clock ticks down and you know, you realize how short and fragile all
life is, what's the thing you know has to be said?
Jesus, the long dinner of Passover
complete, looks at his friends, these men who've been with him for three years.
He's tried to explain so much to them. He's tried so hard to explain who he is, who God is. He's probably been
thinking all day about what to say, how to sum up everything and, maybe,
prepare them for what's coming.
"I'm going to give you a new
commandment," he says. All the side conversations stop at that moment.
Thomas and Andrew leave off their discussion of who would have won this year's
Masters. Simon and Matthew, to everyone's relief, stop their political debate. This
is the moment. This is a new
commandment.
"Love one another. Just as I
loved you, love each other."
After this, everything falls
completely apart. And these words, which his disciples all sat awaiting,
breathlessly, are now half-forgotten. It will be days, weeks before they
realize what Jesus was asking them to do.
And two-thousand years later, we're
still giving those words so little attention
But it's this one statement, this
one simple and, yet, so complex an action, that Jesus wanted us to remember. In
the last hours, he didn't give a damn about who was right or who was wrong, who
was in and who was out. He had no time left for stupid arguments about how we
can show off our fearlessness or who is the most Christian political candidate.
The time, he knew, was too short for anything but the most important things.
Almost two-thousand people died in
the U.S. from this virus yesterday. That's a significant portion of the
six-thousand souls it took from us across the globe. And whether you want to
believe the lie that the numbers are overinflated or the horrible possibility
that they're too small, we are past the time of realizing how brief and fragile
are our lives. And the most important words Jesus ever said to us came on this
day, this night. Love each other.
I have fallen short of this. Even
in the midst of this tragedy, I've not lived out this commandment. Like a child
who's neglected his parent's dying words, I've allowed Jesus' most important
statement to become more of a suggestion.
But then I hear the stories you're
hearing. Husbands and wives, mothers and fathers are dying and those who love
them can't be there in that final moment. People, healthy one moment, are gone
before a week has passed.
And I realize that Jesus was
speaking into moments like this, moments of such grief, tragedy, and heartbreak
that all else is stripped away. He was within the moment where there really is
only one thing that matters, one thing that makes any difference.
Love one another. Just, love each
other.
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