Easter is a time for compulsory superlatives and grand
anthems and huge hopes. The effect on me
is a felt need to slip away to find somewhere a bit of quiet and sensitivity,
and an economy of words. Do you love me? asks the risen Jesus to
Peter on the beach at Galilee. And there
follows this puzzling litany in which Jesus asks him three times, Do you love me? … as though this is
something we are being asked repeatedly, inwardly perhaps, one way or
another, at our different times and seasons, and as the years go by. Do you
love me…?
Jesus was a Jew. And so
he was well acquainted with the command of the Law: You
shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and
with all your might (Deut. 6:5). You shall love…! It is a command. It is not as though we have another
option. Moreover, the command calls to
our heart… with all your heart… the
inescapable part of us, what is deepest in us, and so Jesus comes to our inmost
room and asks, Do you love me?
Michael Casey is a Benedictine monk, and a scholar, and an
Aussie – and he points out something about loving God which the church does not
always make clear. It may be that a lot
of people simply wouldn’t believe it.
He goes to the teaching of the rabbis on this crucial verse in
Deuteronomy which says we are to love God with all our heart. We are to bless God, say the rabbis, with
both our good and (in Hebrew) our yetserim,
our evil impulses. Think about it… This is what Michael Casey writes:
Even the shadows in
our personal history are called upon to bless the Lord. We are not to exclude our sins… they are not
to be banished from consciousness… We never graduate from a state of being
utterly dependent on God’s mercy and forgiveness. In fact the more we advance along the
spiritual path, the more aware we become of our impediments… and of the burdens
we carry as the result of choices made in the past. We are not to ignore these liabilities; they
also must join in our hymn of praise to the God of grace… We thank God for the
darkness in our life, for the mistakes we have made…[1]
What we might normally wish to conceal, what lies behind our
various facades, all of this is brought forward like the recalcitrant,
rebellious child at some junior concert.
Our frailty, our fallibility, our woundedness, is all an essential part
of our praise and worship. All of us, in
grace, is set free to love God and to love all that God loves. What is inappropriate in prayer and worship is
our falsity, our image, and our facades.
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