“Jesus said to them, ‘You’ve no idea how I’ve looked forward to eating this pascha with you before I suffer” (Luke 22.15).
One of my favorite scenes in the movie Moonstruck (1987) comes early in the film. Loretta (Cher) is in the kitchen with her father Cosmo (Vincent Gardenia), pouring them both a glass of champagne. Cosmo, sitting in his robe and pjs, watches her doing this and a sweet smile comes and fills his face and eyes.
It’s a subtle bit of acting that, to me, captures so well the moment that comes to me sometimes when I’m with someone dear to me. It’s always something mundane: perhaps Leanne’s filling her coffee cup or sending a text. But in that moment, it’s that she’s more present to me than normal, or perhaps I am. Because sitting or standing there, I see her in all her incarnations—the woman across from me on our first date, the one who encouraged me to go and finish my degree, the person who taught me to let her do things for me. And in that moment, my heart overflows. I’m caught by how much I not only love her today, but in every moment and as each person she has been through our years.
This is what I like to think happened to Jesus in this moment, sitting there at the table with his friends gathered around. He’s watching them taking their seats, jockeying for position, and probably already talking amongst themselves who’s the “greatest.” In those few seconds this is happening, he sees them as they were and as they are.
Peter: skin weathered by wind and water who was standing on the dock with his feet bare and his hair wet, at home with mouth agape as his mother-in-law runs about the kitchen, so matter of fact in his confession that Jesus is the Anointed One, this man who has become a leader of this group.
James and John: heads down while the seabirds hovered overhead and they mended their nets, their sheepish looks as their mother asks if they can be at Jesus’ right and left, these two men who witnessed a moment outside of time atop the mountain.
Somehow he sees them all both one by one and all at once. It’s as if the room is filled with multiple versions of each. And maybe it coalesces back into the eleven of them when someone leans close and asks why he’s smiling.
Perhaps this kind of glimpse was something Jesus was used to seeing. Maybe it’s how the Divine sees us all the time: as all we have been and are to this moment. Possibly, this is the lens of love, and my experience with it is a taste of that.
It makes sense, to me, that love, true love would see the world and those within it as such. Love, cultivated over time, is not an experience of only the present but of all we’ve lived through and experienced with others—people and animals—over the years. It’s part of loving someone wholly and completely as we are loved.
And that makes me wonder if this was not a momentary thing, but how Jesus—Love Incarnate—experienced the world. Could it be that he reached out with such compassion, kept company with the outcast, and refused to act violently even when they came for him in the night because he saw everyone as all that are and have been?
With the Samaritan woman at the well, was it not only knowing she’d been married many times but seeing the person she was then? In the midday sun, did he see her abused, neglected, abandoned. Is that why he sat with her scandalously?
Or with the man who lived in chains in the cemetery, outcast from the village: who were the tortured, bullied, sad persons that had gone from peace to madness? Or the woman the crowd was too eager to stone for her adultery: was she once a child without a father, a girl who felt like she would never be loved?
Imagine having that sort of sight with all the people we encounter? What if we saw who each person had been in all the phases of their life? Would we find it easier or more difficult to love them?
It’s impossible for me to choose a single line from Moonstruck, the script’s too well written. But one I return to again and again is spoken by Ronnie (Nicholas Cage) who says, “Love don’t make things nice. It ruins everything. It breaks our hearts.”
Love ruins so many things: it upsets our feelings of superiority, it undermines our attempts to dehumanize, it forces us to see ourselves in the person facing us.
And who knows what sort of world might come of that.
Beloved One, you see us and love us for who we are and who we have been. Give us eyes to see the many persons that make up those we meet; so we may love them as you do.