You can just feel it all around you. There is a tension and a breathlessness as you sense that something is coming to a close. There is a sense of shifting weight, as if you’re leaning from one era into another.
A common human tendency in such times is to check out, to begin to withdraw and pull away from others. Mostly, I think, from both my own experience and in observing others, this is largely unconscious. Maybe we’re already so excited that we’re half living in the future. Maybe we’re hoping to lessen the pain of goodbyes. Or maybe to avoid the goodbyes altogether. Maybe we’re hoping for a gentle and slow fadeout, like the end of a movie.
This is common, and maybe not always or entirely bad, but I can’t say that I recommend it as a best practice. Why? Because most of the time our distancing and withdrawal from others is received as unloving.
Jesus, just before the Passover, could feel it in the air. The end was coming. We don’t know exactly how he knew it, but without over-spiritualizing it (as if he had some prophetic foreknowledge, which is possible, of course), and at the risk of over-humanizing it (as if he were as dimwitted as most of us can often be), I think it’s fair to say that he just sensed it in the air. That same tension, that same breathlessness, that same sense of everything tilting into an unknown tomorrow. He just knew, the same way that you or I ever know such things.
But here’s the remarkable thing: Jesus didn’t withdraw. In fact, as John puts it, “he loved [his disciples to the end.” This being written, incidentally, by one of his disciples. They never felt an unloving distancing or slow fade out of Jesus from relationship with them.
Even more remarkable, in the very next verse John brings up Judas, the betrayer. And even though Judas is mentioned in order to point out that he had already begun down the path of betrayal, there is zero hint whatsoever that John’s “He loved them to the end” meant “Well, all of them except Judas, of course.” Nope. All of them. All the way to the end. Even Judas.
May you and I be so faithful to love others. Particularly those who might be most unloving toward us.
