The School You Are In

The communicable life of God — His mercy, His patience, His kindness, His love — is not something He drops into you finished, the way you would hand someone a coin. It is more like a language, or a craft, or a way of moving, that has to be learned slowly, by living it, by failing at it and being corrected and getting back up, the way you learn anything that goes deep enough to change you.

That learning is the school. And the Teacher does not stand at the front of a room handing out lessons from a distance. He moves in. He pours the very thing being taught into the student and teaches it from the inside.

Let me show you what the curriculum looks like, because you know what love is by watching it happen, not by reading its definition.

Here is the first room. A man is half dead in a ditch by the road — beaten, robbed, left to die. Two respectable people pass him; they have somewhere to be. A third comes, a foreigner from a people the dying man would have despised, and he stops. He kneels in the dust. He pours his own oil and his own wine on the wounds. He puts the bleeding stranger on his own animal and walks beside him on foot. He pays for the man's care out of his own pocket and promises to come back and cover whatever it costs. That is the love. It stops. It kneels. It spends itself on someone who cannot pay it back. When that love pours through a person, the world gets a Samaritan in a ditch.

Here is another room. A younger son has taken his father's money, spent it on nothing, shamed the family, and come crawling home with a rehearsed apology, hoping only to be taken on as a hired hand. While he is still a long way off — still down the road, still rehearsing — the father sees him. And the father, an old man, does something no man of his standing would do: he runs. He runs down the road and throws his arms around the boy and kisses him before the apology can even get out. He does not wait for the explanation. He does not demand the contrition. He runs. That is the love. It does not wait at the door with its arms crossed. When that love pours through a person, the prodigal gets a father instead of a verdict.

Here is the hardest room. It is an upper room, the night before everything, and the Teacher gets up from the table and takes off His outer robe and ties a towel around His waist and kneels on the floor and begins to wash the feet of the ones who will, before morning, betray Him and deny Him and run. He washes the feet of the man who has already made his arrangement with the chief priests. He knows exactly what is coming and He washes their feet anyway. That is the love. It kneels in front of the one who is about to betray it and serves him with its own hands. When that love pours through a person, the betrayer gets his feet washed.

And the last room, the one that holds all the others. A cross on a hill outside the city. The man who told the story about the Samaritan and the running father, who washed the traitor's feet, is nailed to a rough piece of wood and dying in the open air. He is being mocked. He could stop it. What comes out of His mouth, toward the men driving the nails, is this: Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing. That is the love at its bottom, stripped of everything else, with nothing left to give, still giving. When that love pours all the way through a person, the executioner gets prayed for.

These are not different loves. They are the one love that God is, shown from different sides. And the thing I most need you to see is this: that is the love the empty thrones were waiting for. The lifting of the low. The running toward the lost. The kneeling in front of the unworthy. The forgiving of the guilty. The fallen sons would not let that love pour through them. And God, having watched His council fail to love His world, decided to fill the empty seats with children of clay through whom that love would finally, actually, flow.

You. He decided on you.

Not as a second choice. As the plan from the beginning.