“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

This week’s gospel reading includes this passage from John 13, with Jesus poised on the edge of betrayal, washing His disciples’ feet, eating with them for the last time.

He is about to go where they may not yet follow, although they will seek Him. And as they seek Him, what’s their’s to do, their way to follow, He makes clear. It is not an empty road He leaves them. They already know what they are to do.

The love they are to live is agape, a forgiving, unselfish love, a love that doesn’t weigh worthiness or develop due to affection or attraction. This kind of loving is a strange thing and we might well wonder how we are to learn to love that way. Indeed, the only way we can know that love is by having experienced it. And we have experienced it, He reminds us; we have felt it pouring forth from God, from Christ.

When in your lives have you felt that love coming from other people? That experience, of being so loved, forgiven, accepted, enfolded, absolved, is the Christianity that Jesus gave us to create. We would know how to do it because we had felt it. And, I think we do.

The times and places in my life when I have walked into the company of people I had never met before and found myself in profound welcome are few enough to be deeply memorable and humbling. I feel that welcome, dear friends, whenever I meet any of you in the OEF, be it one or two or a whole heaping lot of you, and I have heard others say too, how much being among us is like coming home.

And so here’s where this story gets embarassing: one of the few other places in my life where I have known that love is in Mexico.

I should probably insert here these details: I’m a white, US born person who took French in high school and remember virtually none of it. I’ve travelled abroad very seldom in my life. I have no Spanish. And I was asked to help a friend with a work project in central Mexico for 9 months.

When we got there, my first day at work I was so terrified of running into anyone and being unable to communicate that I cowered in our tiny office until I memorized, “Lo siento, no entiendo” and was pushed out into the hallway with that mantra as my only Spanish.

The welcome I received, that day muttering my apologies for the inevitable failure to understand anything at all - and for the following 9 months, and indeed now, as my friends have called me to come back and celebrate the 10 year anniversary of our time working together (and offered to pay my plane ticket!) - was profound.

Far far beyond just workplace friendliness, people I barely knew went out of their ways to make me welcome. I was offered rides to festivals in beautiful distant cities, given beds in my coworker’s parents and siblings homes – people I had never met insisted on taking me out to dinner, cooking for me, taking me to markets to experience local fruits I’d never even seen before and giving me the only bed in their house, while they slept on the floor.

Why is this so embarassing? Because I knew that had the shoe been on the other foot, had they been the stranger who couldn’t speak the language, their reception in my country would have been utterly different. At best it might have been a bland disinterest, a friendly offer of a lift into town, at its worst, the hostility would have been stunning.

All of the steps that I stumbled through to get my proper papers were eased by a thousand kindnesses and yet it was still hard, long, frustrating, expensive and intimidating. My friends, of course, couldn’t have cared less, didn’t ask me to show a visa before I joined their soccer team (even if they sometimes had to point me in the right direction on the field) - the welcome, the love, I experienced from them was straight up agape, taking me in with all my unworthiness, loving me despite myself.

So, Jesus was right. I do know what to do, I do know how to follow Him. I know because I have been loved like that. And I can but try to love nearly so well.

You know, every so often the parallels in my life are astounding! This very topic has been drilled into me from all sides this week, not only in the sermon I heard Sunday (which I discussed Monday on the e-list), but in my Monday night study group. We are going through the DVD series "Living the Questions," which examines some of the hard questions of our faith. This week's topic was Jesus' radical compassion. He often broke the rules of his time to reach out to others, and we talked about how dangerous that is, even now. In the case of the law in Arizona, I believe Jesus would definitely break the law to welcome those folks. I'm not sure I could do that, though I would certainly want to. I've never been in that position, and I probably never will, but what would I really do? Something to think about.

What a wonderful post... Thanks for sharing. It was a Blessing to read...