Sedona, AZ –I recently wrote about loving as Jesus did. It sounds yummy but it has a hitch in its get-along. You see, Jesus didn’t just love the easy ones, the ones who followed him, who thought like he did. He loved the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the Samaritans, the lepers, and he even loved those who persecuted him.
Maybe that’s why so many think he was a God, why that kind of love can’t be expected from us mere humans. Love like that is not to be found in humanity’s nature. Is that why so few actually consider loving like Jesus a possibility?
to love like Jesus …
Wouldn’t that mean giving up all the ways you think you are right and in doing so convict others of being wrong? After all, how can you love someone, truly love them unconditionally, and hang onto their wrongness. Some folks talk about loving the sinner but hating the sin. I’ve had that done to me, and it sure didn’t feel like love. Is that how Jesus loved? Did he give sinners ‘the speech’ before letting them sit down to dinner? Maybe he just held his judgment inside and kept his opinions of their sins to himself?
What do you think? It doesn’t sound like the Jesus I know.
What if Jesus knew something most of us don’t? Perhaps he knew without a sliver of doubt that right and wrong were mental ideas, concepts of separation, and had absolutely nothing to do with love. Maybe he grokked that this place is the big dreaming, a world that teaches us how to love, that offers up experiences of free-will that aren’t actually free at all. Do you suppose he knew that everyone is in pain; everyone is hurting, some just hide it better than others, and just maybe that’s what made him so memorable?
Loving, contrary to the agreed upon story, has nothing to do with forgiveness either, at least not forgiving another for their experience of life. Dig deep enough and it becomes obvious that the only one we need to forgive is ourselves, and digging a bit deeper we discover that even that idea is nothing but layered concept. It would be slightly more accurate to forgive life, to see it for what it is, to realize that no one is making choices, that life is simply life-ing and there’s no way for what was to be different. It was what it was, and no matter how much you fight it, nothing can change that. People were who they were. Our experience of them hinged more on our own demons than theirs.
Bad shit happens. That’s a big part of life, the stinky sticky part. Spinning in our own traumas, we pass them along, projecting cause and effect outward, desperately attempting to rid ourselves of our inner plagues. We all do, or at least did it. You didn’t do anything wrong. You simply didn’t have the skills to deal with the wounding, to meet the hurt and pain, to heal and whole it .. yet.
You didn’t know then what you know now, that hanging onto the anger, the disappointment, the rage so rife with judgment, gave the sticky experience a place to set up shop in your body. You hadn’t experienced all the prerequisite lessons that would bring you to the point of clarity. When you didn’t know what to do with the trauma, you did the only things you could, you unconsciously gave it a room at the inn.
It’s doesn’t take an intricate translation to see the common threads between 2000 years ago and today. In today’s world, at least here in the US, instead of tax collectors and sinners we have disruptive politicians, a corporatocracy that likes to blame inflation instead of their own greed, power-filled, power-hungry elites, the idea of elites, and the contagion that is the health insurance industry. Hmm … sounds a lot like the power structure Jesus came up against.
We also have those who want to hand over or take away what rights are left, cults that demand we love and worship as they do, those who see differing points of view as threatening, who basically want us to be exactly alike, all the while thinking that the other guys are the heart of the troubles. Again … quite similar.
We are a split society, split right through the heart. It brilliantly mirrors the inner split, the idea of separation, the belief in us versus them. How could it not?
to love like Jesus …
In light of today’s story appearing real, what would loving like Jesus look like … and is it even possible? Does it mean losing all discernment? How about doing one’s inner work, ascending and leaving the world behind? Shall we turn the other cheek, stand down and keep our mouths shut in order to keep the peace as we are herded into another’s definition of good and evil?
What would Jesus do? I never liked that phrase. It always seemed so … judgmental, so whatever you’re doing, it’s wrong, but it seems to fit as I tease love apart.
Jesus was an anarchist. More than anything, that’s the reason he was crucified. He was a rabble rouser, a thorn in the power structure’s side. His words were attuned to the times in which he lived, not messages to be taken literally thousands of years later. Everything he said, everything he did, pointed a flashing neon finger at how the ‘least of us’ are treated. His was a message, not that we could be saved, but that we don’t need saving. We already are, have forever been. He wanted us to know that we are not lesser or greater than anyone, that we are all beings of love, and his life was the demonstration. Love was the core of every teaching, love unconditional, love for everyone, love that doesn’t judge, love that embraces life as it is.
Love’s expression looks different for you than it does for me, and different from how it looked for Jesus. Love has infinite faces. It wears yours, and mine, and all those seeming enemy faces too.
For Jesus, it looked like upending tables in the marketplace, a demonstration of ‘no, this is hurtful … stop!’ It looked like healing the sick, raising the dead, filling jugs with wine, what we in our ignorance still call miracles today. For Jesus, it looked like teachings, teachings that were more than what today’s understanding gives them credit for. He didn’t tell people to give their coats as well when someone sues them for their shirt to show submissiveness. He was offering a way to point out the system’s greed that wouldn’t get them in more hot water.
Love for me may be a demonstration of compassion, taking dinner to an elderly neighbor, smiling at a stranger for no reason at all, stopping to talk to the homeless woman and really seeing her, or as I so often do, writing about love, encouraging, modeling authenticity. It’s my invitation to all of you to be vulnerable, more so in each moment.
Whatever love looks like for you will organically appear, will seem ordinary, quite natural, and resonate with simplicity. It might even be compassion-in-action appearing without the need to think about it. It may be so insignificant as to seem unimportant. It’s what you are doing now, or what you would do if you didn’t overthink it. It is your perfect offering, not perfect as minds see it, but perfect because it comes from you, because it comes from the heart of you.
Jesus was Jesus. He was fully himself, both God and man. He discovered who and what he is, and brought the totality to ground. He owned who he was. He was real, authentic, not tied up in shoulds and woulds and coulds. He was right now, exquisitely here, exactly as he was. That’s where what we call miracles come from. He didn’t wrap himself in ideas and concepts like impossible, yesterday, tomorrow … ideas of twoness, of not Godness, of God and other. He stood at the living intersection of God and man, at the center of the cross, infinitely alive, and as that, love naturally poured forth through his every breath.
To love like Jesus … be genuinely yourself.
Like this and want to read more? Check out my latest book, Actuality: infinity at play. https://amzn.to/3Rd4CTY
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