Our passage speaks of an unnamed follower of Jesus, calling him - “the disciple Jesus loved.” Tradition identifies John as this follower, and rightly, which is seen by conferring with the John writings in the New Testament.

The Greek word for “loved” is a form of agapaō: “loved with Divine Love, God's Love.” This, mystically, entails: “Loved with God,” or “God loved through.” For, Love and God are Essence.

This word speaks of the Divine Love, a Love all loves find fulfillment in. Such is this equation of God and Love, the tradition of John identifies God with agapē: “But anyone who does not love does not [truly, experientially] know God, for God is love [agapē] ” (I John 4.8, NLT).

However, Scripture never turns that around, saying, “Love is God.” Yet, we could say: Agapē is God – but not identifying Essence with any of the other expressions of Love in Greek: friendship love, family love, romantic love.

We can see, then, a Love that includes all loves. This Love, indeed, validates the spirituality of other loves. In Agapē familial love, friendship love, and erotic love find themselves Sacraments of Christ. Indeed, as we become more complete in all loves, we become more like God, we become more Godly - more Whole.

I share words from Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, from his Love's Sacred Order, and his chapter “A God Crushed by Love.”

God is agapē, says St. John, the disciple, the beloved disciple [who] leaned back on the breast of Jesus at the Last Supper and drank in the knowledge emanating from the Heart of the Savior. John's position on Jesus' breast is to me the most graphic possible illustration of the union of all four loves: the child feeding at his mother's breast, the friend at his friend's side in leisurely conversation, the lover and the beloved at their wedding feast, the thankful creature joyfully receiving its being from its Creator.

For Leiva-Merikakis, and us, this entails a profound mystery. This mystery pertains to our intimate participation in the Holy Trinity, as a Society of Love.

God is agapē … means that there is nothing in his Being or actions that is not motivated by his desire to give himself and bestow eternal life and bliss – first the Father as eternal source, begetting the Son and breathing forth their Spirit, then the Blessed Trinity coming to dwell within us.

John, then, represents the Christian who seeks to lean into the intimacy of Christ - that is, intimacy inhering in the Nature of God. He or she longs above all to be near the Heart of God. This spiritual Christian is not a person denying the importance of lesser loves. Rather, the spiritual Christian finds all other loves, and their capacity to expand infinitely, within this Supreme Love. We are called to be a John – one leaning into the Heart of the Trinity, for the whole Trinity, and more, is within the Sacred Heart of Christ.

Then, this leaves us the question: “How does one lean upon the breast of Love?” Only a trusting surrender. When leaning on this Breast, one seeks the Heartbeat, the Intimate Knowledge, that cannot come by teaching or words, doctrines, rituals, or churches. Rather, John leans directly, without mediation upon the Breast of His Beloved.

Now, “How?” For does not every true Christian yearn to be a John? To find a way to lean mystically on Christ and, thereby, His Mystical Body - the Church? Does not such a one know, feel, the earthy institutions "Church" is - are - not the mystical Church - the Body of Christ? Does he or she not long to know Christ directly, rather than mediated by the rules and traditions of men and women? If he or she can use such earthly clay to know Christ immediately, shall he or she not, if wise in such matters, do so? But will the person not disdain, pity, and turn from the means whereby the "Church" claims only it can offer this Christ, and its ways are the sole way to this Christ?

This way, like other things we do daily, is practical. The early Desert monks called this practico. This is spiritual practice. As we learn to play an instrument, or golf, or cooking, or sewing, using a computer program, or driving a vehicle, we learn how to live close to the Heart of Grace.

John did not lean upon Jesus to consume Jesus. He leaned for he wanted to be near his Best Friend. He wanted to sense into, feel into, the Heartbeat of Love. There was no purely utilitarian motive. He leaned for he loved. This took him out of the world of utilitarianism. What is utilitarianism? Spiritual utilitarianism is that practice of religion, or spirituality, whereby we are driven for the end to which we aim: the utility, usefulness.

But what is useful about John leaning up Jesus? His leaning is useless. John is motivated by no practical ends that would benefit Him: he is loving Love, Jesus, in agapē, in God. He is asking nothing of the Friend. He is, literally, in Love. This symbolizes, mystically, the Union of Love every Christian is called to realize more and more fully, the Communion of All in the Heart of God.

This takes us to the contemplative dimension of the Gospel? Contemplation, and the practico of it, is useless. Contemplation, the exercise of mystical union with the Trinity, is beyond the dualism of useful-useless. Such Love is useless; yet, it is not useless. Such love is useful; yet, it is not useful - and all heresies are dualities that deny sacred paradox. These paradoxes find a Center in a larger Life: where the dualities that separate, confuse, and isolate us are resolved in the Mystery of God.

So, lean. Yet, do not come to spiritual practice with a big agenda. I'm going to get enlightened. I'm going to become one with God. I'm going to become a great lover of persons. I'm going to be a martyr. Forget all that. That is all about you. You want all these things, and you will use God to get them. Then, you will feel good, spiritual, right, better, holy, … Forget it all. Die to all that. Live for only, become only, share only Christ. Lean into Christ, for no reason but that you Love Him. Then, you shall know true Love, you shall be in Love.

Now, yes, in the lesser loves, usefulness applies. Those loves are in duality. It is fair to want to have romance, not only to make love, but to have someone make love with you. It is alright to seek certain benefits from being in family. It is not wrong to be in a friendship with useful intentions of not only what you can give but what you expect from another. Yet, even these can share in agapē; thus, the Divine Love tempers, sometimes constrains, at other times extends such loves beyond their natural capacities inhering in themselves.

Then, agapē, transcending and including all qualifications within the Good, dissolves all identifications in duality. In Divine Love, the love leaning into Christ, one no longer needs to equate his or her identity with anything – his or her “I-Amness” - “I'm a Christian,” “I'm a Hindu,” “I'm a Buddhist,” “I'm a Democrat,” “I'm a Communist,” "I'm a nationalistic," … So, you are? Are you? So, have you not come from the absorption in Divine Love, in Christ, and created in your mind the separation of equating your Essence, which in God is whole, unconfused, unfragmented, into the fragmentation of mutiplie identies created in time by men and women? Does not every war arise from this separation, this diminution of Essence?

Yes, in Love as and with Love, we “descend” like-with Christ, the Logos, descended, that we might, like-with Him, “ascend.” Yet, we have plunged ourselves fully into the divisions of space and time [our Fall], when we force an identity upon our Soul, in the Trinity of Loving. We say, “I'm a Christian,” and, if we identify ourselves with that historical group, we fragment ourselves from every other apparently contrary group. Thereby, we foster fear, hate, and violence. Then, we say we love the world. How can we, fragmented in our mind like that, set over against, claiming superiority? Yet, we imprison ourselves, fearing the freedom of leaning upon the Breast of Christ, where all I and other cease in One Embrace.

This is not a watering down of the teachings of Christ. No, Sir. No, Mam. This is lifting up the Wisdom of God to a dimension of Love, exemplified by John, that we have denied by our mentalities about the Way of Christ, our turning the simple Gospel into instituitonal arrogance. And ordaining men and women to put Christ, and this Love, in a box of our own making - of couse, we claim the leading of the Spirit in doing this horrible act to Christ.

I am not watering down the Gospel; the Gospel has been already so watered down, possibly even Jesus would not recognize what we have done to and with it – and He likely would be appalled, so contorted is His simple Gospel - Good News.

Do you want to be a Christian? Lean on Christ. Do not identity with any faith. Okay, say you are Christian, if you will. I do. Yet, mean by that no equation of your locus of allegiance and being with Christianity. If a Christian sect, or other religious sect, claims your allegiance, refuse that allegiance. With Christ, religions are means to the realization and sharing of agapē, otherwise, they are useful institutions trying to save their own lives, and spattering enough of religiousness to fool others and themselves into thinking they are really leaning on Jesus alone.

Finally, did Jesus die to fragment us? No. He did not die for you to be a Christian. He died for you to know Love. Then, spiritually, but not otherwise,we can say, any man or woman who finds in such Love the Way to God, the Way of Grace, be whatever his faith or unfaith, he has found Christ, he leans upon the Heart of God.

You say, “Dare you reduce Jesus to such?” I reply, “Sad the consensually pathetic minimization of such Love to create even more fragmentation, confusion, division, hate, and warring in our world?” Shall I dare say, “The reliance on Love, is the reliance on God, and all the Trinity, whether consciously or not; and, thus, there is much of Christ that goes not under the name of Christ, and much that goes under the name of Christ that betrays and denies Christ, rather than leaning on His Breast to love and be loved in Love – the only Site of nonfragmentation – and share that world longing to know a way that does not divide God, and does not divide us.”

This writing is not to defame your faith, anymore than defame my Christianity associations. It is, however, to ask you, "Do you want to be free, share freedom, and live with those free?" Then, are you willing to withdraw all your identifications from lesser loves? Are you willing to quit hiding behind your beliefs, your religious group, your pious rituals, your sacred traditions - and be honest about it all, rather than clinging to it all like your life depended on it? Do you want to get real about all this? Do you Love Christ enough to do this? Or does your love for yourself convince you to keep reducing both the Gospel, the Church, Love, and your spirtual Family to the boundaries convenient for you - boundaries you were given by others, without any logical basis to prove those boundaries are of God, or in Love, or honorable to Christ?

I write as a man aspiring to live in Christ. And a man who has not found a place to fit in the institutional churches of my native faith group - I left amidst fussings and fumings over the Bible (which was at core an egotistic war for power and control) - and the last denonmination I served for ten years - who, as I have know it, is trying to take the useful path to save itself. So, free of instituational religion, possibly, I can help others find freedom either in or from such religion - possibly, to emerging and new images of Christian community fit for our time and place.

Yet, I do affirm the ecclesia, the spiritual Communion of all in Christ. If one cannot find that in a sanctuary, better he or she find it on a park bench with one other person who truly seeks to lean upon the Breast of Christ.

Who am I? I cannot tell you that, for every mystery of person is in God, and is not to be seen by human eyes - though glimpsed. To see me outside that Mystery, you would see a man deeply in Love with God and the true Church, a clergyperson walking around in collar and with crucifix. Yet, if you truly heard his heart, he would say, "Give yourself to Christ, lean upon Christ, not any person are group who claims to give you Christ. Simply, purely, live in Love, and you shall live in God. You shall be a walking Sacrament of Agapē. You shall be like your spiritual brother, John the Apostle."

Blessings!
Rev Dr Brian K. Wilcox
Maundy/Holy Thursday
April 9, 2009