LOVING JESUS AND LOVING LIKE JESUS

“We find rest in those we love, and we provide a resting place in ourselves for those who love us.” Bernard of Clairvaux

In the midst of joy and the hectic, blissful challenges of welcoming and tending to a new life in Mia and happy bonding with Jaelen, my surprise foundational experience as a new grandfather is that of rest, the grounded rest that Bernard of Clairvaux wrote about. The rest is nested in love, the love that is “unyielding as grave and as strong as death.” Both Jaelen and Mia embody and exude this rest more purely and freely than any other. I do not know where this otherworldly love and rest come from, except for the undeniable fact that I feel and experience them.

For most of my Christian life, I have been taught to love Jesus. While spotty and flailing, my absolute best has been the Philéo kind, the human, the conditional, which Jesus expects and graces. Loving Jesus is only possible because it is graced. This morning, it dawned on me that loving Jesus should naturally flow into loving as Jesus did. This “dual” emphasis of loving Jesus and loving like Jesus is how we are supposed to live our lives. And this “supposed to” is not the grit-your-teeth kind, but the fully alive kind as humans. One of the prerequisites of loving Jesus is seeing Jesus in my everyday life, and loving like Jesus means seeing the world the way Jesus sees the world. The humanity of Jesus shows us how it is done, channeling the divine universal Christ in humanity to discern how to love in human clothing.

Our love for Jesus transforms how we see, listen, and love as Jesus loves. Because human love is always contextual and immanent, our love is grounded in the present and in practice, making it radical and tangible. For humans, divine love only makes sense as love when it touches humanity. Otherwise, it is merely a concept with no bearing on this earth.

Looking back, at the center of the greatest periods of transformation in my life was none other than love, the unconditional, pure love. Even then, I have repeatedly failed to love as Jesus did. Doing the right things often took precedence over doing the loving things. Loving like Jesus means being with the world God created and loves, including people, the broken-hearted, the poor in heart, the meek, and the oppressed. Loving like Jesus means inviting people to wake up from illusions and touch Reality. Loving like Jesus means asking deep, existential questions and holding free, generous space, rather than giving answers or offering solutions. Loving like Jesus means serving and sacrificing without losing our true selves. Loving like Jesus means discerning when to say yes and when to say no. Loving like Jesus means resisting, exposing, and fighting against evil: principalities, powers, and the rulers of darkness of this world.

As we love Jesus, we join Jesus in turning our eyes toward the world and loving it as Jesus loves. Love is both looking in and looking out, creating a love-havoc trail in its path. In the process, love transforms us from the inside out, and the same love extends to the farthest corners of the world. Love becomes both being and doing, contemplation and action, and renewal and service. Jesus is no longer the ultimate object of our love as if we were two separate beings; rather, we become united with Jesus as one, from which loving as Jesus flows.