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| Crucifix in Abbey Refectory |
Nice thought, true of many good people, we might
say. Until we pay attention to the whole
story.
No one questions that Jesus loved his own in the
world. Where matters get tangled is when
we turn “his own” into a neat box with the disciples, and by extension all
disciples, ourselves safely inside and everyone else locked out.
Jesus did love his disciples. The warmth and intimacy of John 13-15 make
that very clear. But he didn’t stop at
the boundaries marking off the twelve, or the seventy-two, or even the hangers
on. Jesus loved them all. He loved the friends who accompanied him, the
crowds who drained him, the suffering who counted on his power to save them
from their plight. And he didn’t stop
with those who needed him. He loved
Jerusalem and wept over those of its people who refused all his efforts to
gather them in as a hen gathers her chicks.
That startlingly tender image makes it clear that his love was always
deeply personal, even when it was not
returned. And he didn’t stop with the
anonymous populations of the city.
His failure to stop becomes more and more
incomprehensible to us as the story unfolds. He loved even those who fought him
tooth and nail over his upsetting message.
He loved the angry little knot of leaders who condemned him, men who
could have held such promise. He loved
Pilate, who had a glimmer of the truth and refused it for his own political
safety. He loved the crowds who hollered
for his crucifixion, though they were mostly his own people, and crucifixion
was an alien barbarity imported by the Romans.
He loved the soldiers who whipped him, forced rough thorns onto his
head, mocked him, and led him pitilessly to the place of execution under the
weight of an unbearably heavy cross.
They were doubtless all strong men, but it was a bystander they forced
into helping him. He loved the crowds
assembled for the spectacle of crucifixion.
He loved the soldiers who threw him down on the ground, the men who
drove nails into his hands and feet, the none-to-gentle crew that hauled the cross
upright and set it in its place. They
were not ghouls, though they seem so to us.
They were soldiers just doing their job, hardened by years of violence. They even took the trouble to offer him a bit
of wine on a sponge when he was thirsty.
He didn’t love them in the
abstract, after the fact. He loved them,
all of them, even at the very moment they went about their terrible task. He loved them not as an aggregate—“the
Romans,” “the Sanhedrin,” “the soldiers.”
He loved them personally one by one.
You see, they were all his own, because they were
all the works of God’s hands, all part of the distorted human race God set out
so resolutely over centuries and millennia to retrieve from their selfish
choices, all potential members of Christ’s body crucified and risen and, in a
way we will never comprehend, opened out to gather all human beings into his
own being, except those who refuse. And
even those, he loves enough to let them make their own choices, though he did
and does go to unimaginable lengths to convince them otherwise.
Love, said St. Thomas Aquinas, is not about fuzzy
feelings. Love is willing the good of
the other. To will a good means to go to
every length possible to bring it about.
And Jesus did. And does.
As we read the Passion accounts this week, and
remember the events they recount, we may ourselves think ill of the “enemies,” from
the relative safety of our assurance that we belong to “his own,” and they, of
course, do not. What is nearly
impossible for us to imagine is that they do.
From our perspective, what they did gave him every reason to strike them
all down in retaliatory rage. We would
have found it satisfying if he had. We
like to see the good win and the villains come to grief at the end of the
story. But Jesus did them no harm at
all. No doubt the evil at work
everywhere in the story did its best to tempt him to hate them enough to wreak
havoc on them. Perhaps that was his
final temptation. If so, he refused it
to the end. “Father, forgive them, for
they know not what they do.”
We cannot even stand back in remote admiration at
so remarkable a choice. That’s a luxury he denied us himself. “Love your enemies,” he says, “and pray for
those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44).
And, this week, shows us what he meant.
Some days, I wish he hadn’t.
Note: St.
Benedict articulates all the demands of love, mostly through extensive
Scripture quotations, in Chapter 4 of the Rule, “The Tools of Good Works.”
