“What’s love got to do with it?” Tina Turner sang that question in the 1980s. The peculiar faith of Christians offers an answer: everything.
Christianity began, not with an institution, or a doctrine, or a text, but with table fellowship. The many meals Jesus shared equally with the socially powerful and the least likely, the stories he told of wedding banquets and feasts, the tender washing of feet and the risky, self-offering of bodily vulnerability – all this and more set the Table around which the earliest Christians gathered. In short, love set the Table, and it turned the world upside down (Acts 17:6).
Since then, texts, doctrines, and institutions have (sometimes well and sometimes poorly) tried to pass on that social witness to radical love, and for a singular reason: Love changes everything.
Landmark legislation and milestone judicial rulings can change many things (from civil rights to environmental protections). Strategy sessions and protest rallies can change the course of social policies and labor practices. All of these make a difference for a better world but they can’t give what each of us truly wants and what the world really needs: Love.
The Apostle Paul apparently agreed. To the first century Christians in Corinth he wrote:
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing (1 Cor. 13:1-3).
More than most people today seem to realize, the history of Christian reflection and practice simmers with love’s peculiar, life-changing energy.
“Love bade me welcome,” wrote the Anglican poet George Herbert in the 17th century, just as Julian of Norwich, writing two centuries earlier, insisted that “Love was our Lord’s meaning…and in this love our life is everlasting.” Maximus the Confessor, writing still earlier, in the seventh century, went so far as to name that divine love “Eros.” If Eros is love, he wrote, then that love which unifies all things is God.
Encountering Love, receiving it, and bearing world-changing witness to it defines the essence of Christianity’s peculiar faith. And I too often and rather quickly forget this.
So tonight I join millions of Christians around the world and return to the Table of Love. Today is Maundy Thursday, the day to remember especially the final meal Jesus shared with his closest friends and the mandate (from which we get the word “Maundy”) he issued at that Table: Love one another as I have loved you (John 13:34).
I go to that Table not first because I need forgiveness (though I certainly do), or because of religious obligation (though it is that). I go because Love draws me there.
I may not fully believe it and I might go haltingly. I will likely go worrying that I’m not quite ready or that my thoughts aren’t focused clearly enough or that I myself am not nearly loving enough to receive love. Nonetheless, Love draws me.
A wise colleague once noted that “love changes us so that we can change the world.” What’s love got to do with it? Everything.
Thanks for this wonderful reflection Jay. Thought you might like to see the table prayer I adapted and wrote for our agape meal in Maundy Thursday chapel today:
On their own, the bread and the cup, all of this food is only physical sustenance.
To become a foretaste and a promise of love made real and a world made whole,
they need a story and a blessing and a people who gather in humility to follow God’s commandment to love each other whole-heartedly.
That night, the last night Jesus would share a meal with his friends,
it would not have been God’s table if they hadn’t all been gathered around it:
the betrayer and the beloved, the power-hungry and the justice seeker, the faithful and the fickle.
When Jesus took the bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it to them,
when everyone could eat –
the outcast and the friend, the arrogant and the gracious, the oppressed and the oppressor –
then that table became a foretaste of love made real and of a world made whole.
When Jesus took the cup, and blessed it and poured it and shared it with them
when everyone could share –
the marginalized and the privileged, the foot-washer and the ones that were washed,
then that sharing became an act of humble solidarity,
living into the promise of a more just, loving and hopeful future.
And the promise is that when we are together,
when we tell the story and give the blessing, when we break the bread and share the cup
we too will discover a foretaste of love made real and of a world made whole.
So let us eat together, as a new embodiment of that same meal shared by Jesus and his disciples long ago.
May the fellowship we share together be the blessing that makes this food the feast of God’s love, justice and hope.
And as we go from this place,
let us continue walking in the paths of humility, embodying the commandment to show love, to receive love, to be love to one another.
May we be the bread broken that nourishes new life.
May we be the cup poured out in intimate service to others.
Giving thanks for God’s gifts of grace, the love that will not let us go, let us eat!