To Leap with Love in Our Hands

Holy Thursday invites us into the very heart of the Christian life, to remember and live out the truths inherent in the events of that long, dark yet hopeful night: the Last Supper and first Eucharist, Jesus washing the apostles’ feet, Jesus praying in agony and surrender in the garden of Gethsemane, and finally, Jesus arrested by the Roman guards.  

During the Last Supper, after he performed the radical act of washing his disciples’ feet—a job reserved for the lowest-ranking servant in each household—Jesus told his followers: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 14:34-35). The context of this new commandment wrapped Jesus’ words in lived reality. Jesus shows the sacrificial, humility-filled kind of love he was talking about through the act of washing his followers’ feet right before giving the commandment to love as he has loved them, and then follows it with his own act of complete surrender to God while praying in Gethsemane. 

“Love one another, even as I have loved you.” God’s love lived out in us is how people will know who follows Jesus. If we don’t love like Jesus, then we are not truly following Jesus. Love—divine and deep and true—is at the heart of all we believe and all we do as Christians. 

A couple months ago, a Tennessee Williams quote stopped me in my tracks: “The world is violent and mercurial—it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love…. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.” In our current reality, the violence is ever-present and ever-visible, so loud and ugly, it’s often physically painful to follow the news, as my mother’s body aches for murdered, stolen and violated children, for families ripped apart, for senseless wars and disgusting pride that stops at nothing for power and greed.

It feels like we’re all jumping from a world eternally on fire with our hands full of love, desperate to save the only thing that can save us: Love. Only Divine Love can overcome the hate and violence trying to devour the world. Only loving like Jesus did can weave a path of Light through the dark. 

And this Holy Love is often simpler than we might imagine. Ann Voskamp writes, “The prayers we weave into the matching of the socks, the works of our hands, the toiling of the hours. They survive fire. It’s the things unseen that survive fire. Love. Relationship. Worship. Prayer. Communion. All things unseen -- and centered in Christ.” 

So I stand in the kitchen and make soup. Specifically, chicken soup with lots of veggies and quinoa and the richest broth I can manage. I make it for my friend going through an excruciating miscarriage, life and hope draining out of her while I have nothing to offer her but the love and healing I pray into every ounce of the soup. And then a batch for my student who has no one to cook for him and who can’t seem to find enough food to sustain him. I stand next to my stove and chop carrots and celery and spinach, wishing I could rescue every person who doesn’t have enough and pouring all that insufficiency into each sliced vegetable. I make yet another batch for my friend whose baby came far, far too early, and yet they are both miraculously still here on earth, and finally a batch for my own family whose sustenance and growth fill my mind constantly. It’s just a soup, but as I pour my love and hope for complete healing and wholeness and goodness into the broth, it becomes a form of prayer, a simple way to tangibly live out the love of Jesus.

On this Holy Thursday, I pray that you find your own version of soup, a symbol of all the love you hold in your hands as you jump from the flames. I pray that, as we let the words of the Holy Thursday scriptures wash through us, we can recognize simple and real ways we can live sacrificially and with humility, ways we can love the hurting near us, ways we can surrender to the God who loves us without limitation, without boundary, without reason, and without ceasing, just as Jesus did. 

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Rachel Conrad Carlson hopes her life can bring God joy even while living in the daily chaos of parenting three daughters with her husband Nick and attempting to live the creative life. Rachel is a high school English teacher and a lover of cultures, words, thrifting and bringing people together in community, preferably with glasses of sangria in hand.