What is Love?

Every so often, and quite unexpectedly, the words to this dance song from the early 1990s run through my mind. 

What is love? 
Oh, baby, don’t hurt me
Don’t hurt me no more…

Throughout this club anthem, Haddaway returns time and again to this refrain in a song starved by unrequited love. Underlaid with a driving beat, and heavy on the reverb, the song is haunted by a high soulful voice ooh-ing and aah-ing, present, but providing no response to the singer’s bittersweet longing. 

What is love? 

When this melody came to mind this week, I was reflecting on two things: first, the image of Mary at Bethany extravagantly anointing Jesus’ feet; second the question of what we mean by ‘obedience’ in the baptismal liturgy, after a good conversation with those seeking to reaffirm their faith.

Before I could get too far down that road, my mind flashed to yet another scene. Perhaps you remember that moment, later in John’s gospel, when Jesus refers to himself as the vine, and to us as the branches.

“Abide in me,” Jesus says, “as I abide in you.” 

In John’s gospel, at least, love and obedience go together.

When we hear ‘obedience’ with modern ears, many of us reasonably recoil, having seen the ways in which unquestioning loyalty and the demand of obedience has been a ready tool of high-control religion,  the patriarchy, and all seeking control. 

While it doesn’t solve the problem of these experiences, it seems worth considering the context in which we pledge our allegiance to Jesus, and no other. In the context of Jesus’ imagery of vine and branches, obedience isn’t about unquestioning loyalty to an abusive patriarch. The First Nations’ Version of the New Testament translates Jesus’ words this way:

“I am the vine and you are the branches. The ones who stay joined to me will grow much fruit, for without me nothing grows.” (15:5) 

In a world where the Caesars claimed to be the ultimate source of flourishing; in a world where the imperial apparatus claims that fruitfulness comes only through allegiance to the Empire, Jesus makes his own seditious claim, inviting us to join love’s revolution.

When considering the image of the vine and the branches, ‘obedience’ takes on a different character. This metaphor of mutual relationship offers an important corrective to those who would invoke God’s name in service of coercive power. This is a relationship in which we receive sustenance through connection to the vine, yes. It is also a relationship in which the branches have something to contribute to the life of the whole. They are more than just collateral damage. 

We are connected to Jesus and to the world around us in many ways. If we are to embrace Jesus’ own metaphor, we find a gift economy at play. We rely on the vine for water, but the leaves of our lives convert light and carbon dioxide to oxygen and sugar contributing to both the vine and the world around us. Perhaps this vine and these branches have leaves–like the tree in the book of Revelation–that are for the healing of the nations.

What is love? 

Far from a one-sided, unrequited relationship, the God we meet in Jesus is one who gives freely. In contrast to the trumped-up claims of beneficence by the authoritarian state, Jesus offers the free gift of love for one and all. Connected to the vine, Jesus’ love meets us in our longing, meets us in our yearning, meets us where we’re at. Such love does not seek to hurt or exploit. It is not rooted in greed or neglect, it does not turn away or leave us abandoned. 

Mary, more than anyone, in the wake of losing her brother, seems to understand. In her longing, in her grief, in her gratitude at his return, she abides in Jesus’ love. Her obedience, if we can call it that, is in her alignment with Jesus, in rooting herself in the gifts of love freely offered. 

What is love? 

Mary’s extravagant, embodied love is made manifest in her radical generosity. In the same way that Jesus embodies God’s economy of grace, Mary’s love for Jesus is far removed from the impulse to possess or control–an impulse we find in Judas’ comments about the poor. Mary understands wealth not as something to be hoarded, but as having enough to share. Her approach reminds me of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s description of a gift economy in her recent book, The Serviceberry. 

“The currency in a gift economy,” Kimmerer writes, “is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence, and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity. A gift economy nurtures the community bonds that enhance mutual well-being; the economic unit is ‘we’ rather than ‘I,’ as all flourishing is mutual” (33). 

In such an economy–the one that Jesus invites us into, the one at odds with our dominant ways of doing business, the one that Mary seeks to embody, Jesus says, “I no longer see you as servants but as friends.” Jesus decenters himself, noting that in the economy of gift; the economy of love, we enter into mutually transformative relationships. He goes on to say, 

“You are my new garden where I will grow a great harvest of my love–the harvest that remains. When you bear this fruit, you represent who I am–my name” (John 15:14,16).

To grow in such a way is to grow in Jesus’ garden of abundance and reciprocity, abiding in his love that we, like Mary, might acknowledge our wealth, spreading it far and wide that all might have enough and know that they are enough, too.