The Tutor of Love

Have you ever watched someone try to teach a child to tie their shoes? The child fumbles. The loops collapse. The “bunny ears” never quite cooperate. So the parent kneels down, takes the small hands in their own, and guides them through the motion again and again until the muscle memory takes hold.

We learn by being shown. We learn by being held.

This is something we forget about love. We assume we already know how to do it. After all, we’ve been loving people our whole lives, haven’t we? We loved our mothers before we could speak their names. We loved our friends on the playground. We fall in love, stay in love, sometimes fall out of it. Love seems to be the most natural thing in the world, as automatic as breathing.

And yet, when Jesus stands before His disciples on the night before His death, He does not assume they know how to love. He gives them a commandment: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12, NRSV). Notice the qualifier. Not simply “love one another,” but “as I have loved you.”

There is a standard. There is a measure. And the measure is Christ Himself.

The truth is, we don’t know how to love.

Not really. Not in the way Jesus means it.

We know how to feel affection. We know how to enjoy people who please us and avoid people who don’t. We know how to give to those who give back to us. But the love Jesus speaks of is something altogether different, something we must be taught.

 

God Is Not Merely Loving

To understand what Jesus is teaching, we have to begin with who He is. The First Letter of John makes a startling claim: “God is love” (1 John 4:8). Notice the grammar. John does not say God is loving, as though love were one of His many attributes, alongside justice and mercy and wisdom.

He says God is love.

Love is not something God does. Love is what God is.

This is a difficult thought to hold in the mind, because we are used to thinking of love as a verb or a feeling, something that happens between two people.

But in God, love is the very ground of being.

The Father eternally pours Himself out to the Son, and the Son eternally returns Himself to the Father, and the love between them is so real, so complete, so substantial, that it is itself a Person, the Holy Spirit. Before the world was made, before there was anything to love or be loved, God was already love, because God was already this eternal exchange of self-giving.

This is why Christian theology is necessarily Trinitarian. When you hear the word "Trinity" don't start with complex theological questions, or by asking how three persons can still be one God. Ask, "if God was love in essence from eternity, then how would that look?" Love demands an other. Otherwise, it would be self-love. Love shares a bond between persons. That bond is so substantial that it's more than a feeling, it's not just a combination of the two, but something of its own. That's the Holy Spirit. Perfect love, which is God's very being, demands the Trinity.

But love always overflows beyond itself, beyond the persons involved. Love explodes upon the world as a force for good. Love bears fruit. So out of an abundance of love, God creates. All the world, consummated by the creation of man and woman in His love, made to become participants in His essence, His love, is the overflow of God's limitless love, His limitless being. Existence of love itself, because God is He who is (I AM), and I AM is love.

This means that everything God has made exists within love. And love persists within everything that exists. Even if the corruption of "self-love" blinds us from it. One of my favorite quotes from my confirmation saint, St. John of the Cross:

"Think nothing else but that God ordains all, and where there is no love, put love, and you will draw out love." (Letter 26 to Madre María de la Encarnación in Segovia, 6 July 1591)

Notice he doesn't say that where you find love, you put love, so that your love can be there filling the void. That's a part of it. But he says where we sow seeds of love we draw out love that was already there, hidden there, but still within the fabric of existence in what only appeared to be unlovable. By loving others, by loving as Christ loves us, we are not merely going around making people feel better, or being nice. We are participating in the restoration of Creation itself, we are drawing love out of what seems loveless, so that finally, God can once again declare it "good."

Think again what being "in love" means, then! It's not about being wrapped up in a self-serving feeling. To be truly in love is to be in complete and total union with Love Himself.

The Greek word for “in” that the New Testament uses for our life in God, en, suggests immersion, a being-enveloped. To exist at all is to exist in the love of God, whether we know it or not. The atheist no less than the saint draws every breath from a love that holds him in being. As Paul told the Athenians, quoting one of their own poets, “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

So when Jesus tells us to love one another as He has loved us, He is not handing us an impossible homework assignment. He is inviting us into the very life of God. He is saying: this is what you were made for. This is what existence is. Now learn to do it.

 

The Greatest Love

How then does Jesus love us? He answers the question Himself in the very next verse: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).

The Greek here is worth pausing over. The phrase translated “lay down one’s life” is tēn psychēn autou thē, literally “to place his soul.” It is not merely about dying.

It is about a deliberate, willing, deposit of the self.

Jesus is not describing a tragic accident or a martyr caught off guard. He is describing a choice, a placing-down, a handing-over.

Love is a willing offering of the self for the other, as other.

This is what He is about to do. Within hours of speaking these words, Jesus will be in Gethsemane, sweating blood, asking the Father if there is any other way, and then placing His soul into the Father’s hands. He will be arrested, mocked, scourged, and nailed to wood. And He will do it freely. “No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord” (John 10:18).

So here is the first and most fundamental lesson from the tutor of love: love is sacrificial.

Love costs something. Love is not measured by how good it makes you feel but by how much of yourself you are willing to spend on another.

This cuts directly against the air we breathe in our society. Our culture tells us that love is what happens when someone makes us feel valued, seen, fulfilled. Love is the warm feeling. Love is the chemistry. Love is finding the person who completes you. And when the feeling fades, when the chemistry shifts, when you discover that the other person does not, in fact, completely fill every void you have in your soul, then it must not have been love after all, and you are free to move on.

But Jesus shows us a love that begins precisely where the warm feeling ends. He loves Peter through Peter’s denial. He loves Judas through Judas’s betrayal, even calling him “friend” in the garden (Matthew 26:50). He loves us, the Apostle Paul tells us, “while we still were sinners” (Romans 5:8).

The love of Christ is not a response to our loveliness. It is a gift given to us in our unloveliness, and it is precisely this love that has the power to make us lovely.

 

Love and the Struggle With Sin

There is something else Jesus teaches us by laying down His life, and it has to do with our own struggles.

Perhaps you have a sin you cannot seem to shake. You have confessed it a hundred times. You have promised yourself, promised God, that this time would be different. And then you fall again. And again. And the discouragement begins to whisper that maybe you are simply not the kind of person who can be holy. Maybe God is tired of hearing your name on the list.

If this is you, hear what the cross is saying. The Son of God laid down His life for you while you were still in that sin. He did not wait for you to clean yourself up first. He did not love you on the condition that you would finally get it right. He loved you all the way down, into the very pit of your weakness, and He laid down His life there.

Love is stubbornly steadfast. How many times did Jesus try to tell his disciples He was going to have to suffer and die, and how many times did they try fail to understand, or convince him otherwise? Love requires fertile soil, it means clearing away the "rocky" path so that the roots can take hold, so that it can endure.

Often, our struggles are the clearing away of that very rocky path. This is how we learn to love. Precisely because of such struggles, the fertile soil is finally exposed and love and grow deeper roots. It's how we grow into the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

If you've ready my story (you can see it in my book OFFENSIVE GRACE: THE SCANDAL OF RADICAL LOVE - and if you cannot afford a copy, let me know and I'll send you the eBook OR audiobook for free) you know I had a long history struggling with addiction. I still, truth be told, struggle with habitual sin. It's not what it once was, but I'm still a long way from perfection. When I confess my sins, I don't have to be especially creative. I tend to have the same faults, the same weaknesses, the same falls... repeatedly.

I think that's most of us, isn't it? We don't all struggle with the same sins, but the sins we individually struggle with seem to be the same. Which is precisely why it can be so frustrating when we continue returning to our vomit, when we fall despite vowing we'd never fall again. When we trip after we thought we'd finally mastering the art of walking on two feet.

But here's the secret. Here's why I never despair.

Every time I run back into the arms of Christ in Confession, every time I tell Jesus, "this is what I've done, Lord, and it pains me, not merely because I'm scared of hell, but because I love you so much," do you know what He does?

He holds me. He speaks His forgiveness again, and again, and in His speaking, He gives me more of Himself. He gives me more Love. And in that Love, well, I might not be perfected totally just yet, but I begin to detest my sin more, I begin to feel more compunction, pangs of disdain for the sin if I ever fall, and I learn to stop "shuffling" my way back into His arms, but I learn to run.

Not just away from the sin, but into His arms.

This is a winning equation. I don't know exactly how the math parses out, because God's love confounds all my calculations. But I know when I receive more of Him, which is to say, more of Love Himself, the more my sin becomes less something I want to "hide away," or justify. It becomes something to abandon, something to put to death. And you know what? He puts it to death precisely in His most profound demonstration of love: because greater love has no man than this, that a many lay down his life for his friends. His cross, His sacrifice, might look gruesome from the outside looking in, but when you're on the inside of it, when you're on the inside of His heart, it's the purest demonstration of love the world has ever seen.

And that's what He invites us into. Because when He embraces us, He holds us to His heart with hands that still bear the marks of His sacrifice.

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, who knew her own littleness perhaps better than any saint of the modern era, wrote: “What pleases Him is to see me love my littleness and my poverty, the blind hope that I have in His mercy” (Story of a Soul).

She understood that the love of Christ is not a reward for the strong but a gift to the weak.

This means that the struggle with sin, however weary it makes us, is itself an invitation into deeper love. Every time we fall and turn back to Him, we are learning something we could not learn any other way. We are learning that we cannot love by our own strength. We are learning that the love we are commanded to give is not a love we generate; it is a love we receive and pass on.

The branch does not produce sap. It carries the sap of the vine.

“I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5).

 

Learning to Love

So how do we begin to learn this love? Three small practices, drawn from what we have seen.

First, sit at the feet of the Tutor. You cannot love as Christ loves if you do not know how Christ loves. Spend time with the Gospels, especially the passion narratives. Watch Him. Notice how He treats the woman caught in adultery, how He weeps at the tomb of Lazarus, how He looks at the rich young ruler with love even as He tells him a hard truth (Mark 10:21). Let His holy face become familiar to you.

We imitate what we contemplate.

Second, find one small place to lay something down today. You do not have to die on a cross today. You will not be asked to. But you will be asked, perhaps, to lay down your right to be right in an argument. To lay down your need to have the last word. To lay down fifteen minutes of your evening to listen to someone who is lonely. To lay down a grudge you have been carrying for a long time. You may be asked to clean up the mess the dog made on the carpet, rather than waiting for your spouse to get up and take care of it (a challenge I faced just this morning).

Sacrificial love is not usually dramatic. It is usually quiet, hidden, and small. But it is real, and every small laying-down is a participation in the great laying-down on Calvary.

Third, bring your weakness to Him. If you are struggling with a sin, do not let the struggle drive you away from Him. Let it drive you to Him. Do not let your shame, or your embarrassment, keep you away. He already knows what you did, anyway. We like to pretend we can "hide" our sin away by internalizing the struggle, but pretending it didn't happen. But what festers in the darkness spreads, it doesn't go away. And we're only fooling ourselves if we think we have "secret" sins. There is no such thing. God knows our secrets already.

The disciples did not become lovers of Christ by their own competence. They became lovers of Christ because they were loved first, and that love taught them, slowly, painfully, joyfully, how to love in return. They became lovers of Christ through a litany of errors, of foolish mistakes, and even denials. Just read the Gospels, and you'll see how imperfect these disciples were. Once you turn the page, and you get to the book of Acts, you find these same weak and fearful men totally transformed into bold icons of Christ's love. “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).

The commandment to love as Christ loves is not a burden laid on our shoulders to crush us. It is a doorway into the very life of God. The Tutor kneels down beside us, takes our fumbling hands in His own pierced ones, and shows us, again and again, the way we teach a child how to tie his shoes, how the loops are made.

We do not yet know how to love. But we are being taught. And the One who teaches us is patient beyond all our failures, because He is, Himself, love.