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 newcommandment.
“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.