Who was Jesus with? Where would Jesus be? What does it really mean to love people? These are questions I have asked myself lately. At RUF training Tim Udoj, the RUF Campus Minister at Furman Unversity, spoke on how to love people. His opening question was, “How do you love someone when you’re terrified?” At first I thought that was a weird question. I rarely get nervous when talking to people, and I consider myself to be fairly comfortable in social situations, especially after the past year and a half of constantly walking up to complete strangers, introducing myself, leading conversation, and initiating lunch and coffee dates with girls I’ve just met or in some cases never met in person. What did he mean by “terrified”?
Then it hit me. Loving people is always terrifying. It has to be. If it isn’t you aren’t doing something right. To love deeply, to love well, means that there is no part of you that you leave untouchable by the other. It means that there is no part of you that you hide. Instead of protecting yourself from the roving eyes of the other you open yourself up to them in a complete self-forgetting and others-serving manner. This is what it means to “think of others more highly than yourself.” This is what it means to lay down your life for another. To forget what you hold most dear, your own comfort and security, to step out from behind the curtain of our own self-protection is the most radical and uncomfortable kind of love, the most sacrificial. It is the very thing that Jesus himself did. He abandoned his own comfort and pleasure, making himself nothing and becoming obedient to the point of death for us. It is impossible to forget one’s self in love without faulting to an extreme- either the extreme of self-hated or of obsession with the other- without anchoring yourself in Jesus. Knowing that we are secure in Jesus’s work for us on the cross is the only way that you and I will ever be able to allow others to see into us and not die on the spot at whatever they see, find out about, know about us. Jesus already knows; he made peace for it. Ourselves have already been dealt with.
When we believe this it is impossible not to love the outcast. My theory about why so many Christians, particularly the believing college students with whom I work, do not have non-Christian friends is that they are terrified of the discomfort they will feel when they have to open themselves up to someone with whom the warmth of God will not resonate. I believe that we Christians are afraid of the sense of lostness and woundedness and indentiylessness that we will discover in those who do not know Christ. And why are we afraid of it? Because we identify with it, because it is the condition which he have felt ourselves and may sometimes still feel when we forget who we have become in Christ. It’s like a bad memory that we are trying to avoid or the beginning of a cold that we are trying to squelch before it develops into full fledged sickness. I believe we do this because we still don’t rest fully in the finished work of Jesus on our behalves.
Of course, most non-Christians do not give off a lost, wounded, identityless vibe. They are often very warm and friendly and not “scary.” We are all people, after all. I do not mean to suggest that non-Christians make us Christians uncomfortable by and large on the surface level. Many of us have non-Christian friends. But what I am saying is that in the end when I look at myself the reason that I do not love non-believers deeply and well, past a superficial friendship, is because I am afraid of what I will find in them, and I am afraid of what I will find or remember in myself.
Perfect love casts out all fear. My only hope, and your only hope, of loving people well- both Christians and non-Christians alike- is to remember Jesus’s perfect, fearless love towards us. That is the only motivation that will enable us to love others. It is a knowledge that inevitably moves is into love.
April Goes to Clemson 