A Reflection for Thursday of the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time
Find today’s readings here.
Did you ever see the bumper sticker “Jesus loves you! Then again, he loves everybody”?
It always makes me laugh, but also shudder a little bit, because I used to take it to heart. I had heard over and over that all people are beloved of God, even the kid who stole my eraser. Even me. I drew the only possible conclusion: That God loves us because he has no taste. He just goes around loving, and nobody can stop him, because he’s God.
As I got older, I refined this idea a bit, and decided that God probably loves everybody because he recognizes, even better than we do ourselves, how much potential we have. He was there at our making, so he knows what we’re capable of becoming. And that is what he loves: The best version of us, whether we’ve come close to actually achieving it or not.
Eventually, I came to believe that God loves us as we already are, not just for what we might possibly become. But then how could he love everybody, including that rat who stole my eraser? I surmised that God must love humans using some kind of mysterious divine standard that allows him to ignore all the unlovable things about us. The things we know about ourselves and each other are the rind and the pith, but Jesus loves the actual secret orange inside. What is actually lovable about us, deep down, is something we probably know very little about. He loves us for our inherent human dignity ennobled by the divine spark of the incarnation, or something along those lines.
Now I think that Jesus loves who we are, who we might be, who all humans inherently are...and he also likes us.
He likes to be with us. He enjoys it. He may even miss us when we’re not here. I think this because when the good shepherd found the lost sheep, he came back rejoicing. He ran around showing everybody how great it was that he got this one dumb sheep back, because even though he had a good crowd of other sheep, he still didn’t want to lose this particular one.
He also cherished and enjoyed being with the other ninety-nine, whom he also loved for their undeniable sheepfulness (or, if you like, for the goodness inherent in all living things created by a loving God). He wouldn’t want to lose any of them. But there is nothing like having everybody that you love around you. Just because you love all of your children, that doesn’t mean you’re going to be as happy as you can be spending time with most of them and losing one. You’d much rather have all of them there, because you know all of them, and you want to be with all of them. Not most of them, but all. Even the eraser rat. Even me.
Not a tremendous theological breakthrough, perhaps. But I think it would make a decent bumper sticker: “Jesus likes you. Come on home.”
