In a famous passage from his book The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis wrote:
“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is hell.”
God is love, so between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit there is no “bad investment” of their love. Each Person is fully vulnerable to the other—God is light and in him there is no darkness at all—without either reservation in giving or suspicion in receiving. Each not only give of themselves, but give themselves one to another without withholding any part.
So God loved and loves the world. And since God is love, he gave all himself in his son, Jesus. And Jesus, being the full revelation of God’s love, gave all himself to us—we the haters and the enemies of his love. He loved us first, he loves us still, knowing what he does, which is everything about everything about you.
There came a moment when Jesus loved his disciples, John says, “to the end” (John 13:1-5). The trajectory of his life and the “uttermost” of his love brought him to the unimaginable act of dying for them on a cross. But the trajectory and the uttermost also brought him to the unimaginative act of washing their feet.
The astounding thing within this astounding act is that at this moment Jesus knew not only what his Father had given him to do, but also that his Father had given all things into his hands. All of heaven’s power at his disposal and bidding, yet he takes a towel to wash the feet of those who would forsake him, deny him, betray him.
We might be tempted to look ahead at Peter, for example, who denied him, and think, “Yeah, but in the end he turned out to be a great and significant leader in the church!” Since Jesus knew what Peter would become it was easy for him to love him, we reason. It’s easy to love those we think we know will turn out great.
But Jesus also washed the feet of another, Judas, the one who would betray him to his death. Jesus knew Judas and everything about him and, yet, he loved him to the end and served him, too. We, on the other hand, don’t know who may be a Judas. But—and here’s the crux, the heart, the cross of the matter—if we did know they were a Judas, would we love them still?
What does our love depend on? What did Jesus’s love depend on? What does God’s love depend on? God loved us first, without explanation, without definition, without condition (1 John 4:19). God set his love on Israel, because he loved Israel (Deuteronomy 7:7-8). We love because he loves. Because to not love is to risk, not losing love, but to lose ourselves. For we are created in the image of God.
Ask what love is and there’s a million definitions. But the one way God has chosen to describe his love for us is in the giving of his son Jesus Christ, who “loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20).
Sometimes you love a Peter and lay down your life for someone who disappoints or disappears, but then returns and is faithful to the very end. And sometimes you loved a Judas and laid down your life for someone who betrayed you and broke your heart. But you loved, and you love, because love “to the end,” “to the uttermost,” never dies in the heart of God.