After washing all of the disciple’s feet and offering Himself as body broken and blood shed, after Judas leaves to sell Him for thirty piece of silver, and after saying ‘Now is the Son of Man glorified,’ Jesus says: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another” (John 13:34).

How did He just love them?

If you are like most of us, you should be screaming, “How am I going to do that? How am I going to genuinely love my enemies because I want to love my enemies, be broken for them and bleed for them? How am I going to love in freedom? The harder I try to do that, the more I won’t do that, and the more I’ll resent Jesus for telling me to do that. How can I make myself Jesus?”

Perhaps the answer is rather simple and yet as complex as every relationship that you’ve ever had. For you can’t truly know another until you allow yourself to be known, and no one is born knowing this; it requires an intervention, a miracle. And on top of everything else, Satan works day and night to create diversions and triggers in you, so that you’re unwilling to even consider the answer.

I need to remind you of our last three messages.

In the first message, from John 12, we learned that “The commandment is Eternal Life (12:50),” that is “laying down your life (psyche) and taking it up again (10:18),” which is “to love as Jesus has loved us (15:12),” which Jesus just said is “a new commandment.” According to 1 John 2:7-8, it is “the Word that you heard, old and new (eternal)... which is true in Him and in You.”

In the first message, we asked, “What is the Commandment of the Father?” And the Answer is Jesus. In the second message, we asked the question of the Son: “What are you so ashamed of?”

The Commandment is Love, and sometimes I think I actually do love — and this must be who it is that I truly am. But the Commandment is also to Love like Jesus — but I don’t love like Jesus, and so I pretend to love like Jesus. That distance between who I actually am and who it is that I think I should be (and so pretend to be) is my false self — the shadow man, the imposter. And so, I protect who it is that I am, truly, with who it is that I am not. I trap myself in a prison of falsehood that I feel as shame and try to mitigate with accomplishments, good deeds — and of course, fashionable clothes.

The theology, psychology, and sociology of shame is profoundly complex and hard to understand, except that God has built it into our very bodies. We know how it feels.

In 1977, Ms. Rydberg sat me next to Susan Coleman in Masterpieces of American Literature at Heritage High. I immediately thanked God. I wanted to know Susan, but I didn’t really know if I wanted to know her, because I didn’t know her — I just knew that she appeared to be “good for food, a delight to the eyes, and to be desired to make me look cool.” And I wanted to be known by her, but I didn’t want to be rejected by her, so I worked really hard at impressing her with things that weren’t really me. I wore my jacket with all the ski tags, pretended to be cool, and tried to act like I didn’t care what she thought of me. I hid myself in a false self, terrified to be touched and yet longing to be touched by her. And she did the same.

To be honest, she caught my attention with her body, but she captured my heart with something far greater: the Spirit that God had placed within her. One day, after dating for about a year, I broke up with her. The following day, I went looking for her, for once I had lost her, I wanted her again —which only reveals the problem with me: I thought she was a commodity (The Bible calls this “playing the whore.”) I found her in a park by a tree and weeping over me. I just “beheld” her. She had allowed herself to be broken by me, and then I just broke for her. She captured me with the fluid that spilled from her broken heart. It was Life — her life, our life, my life.

After five more years, we became one flesh. And now, 42 years later, I think we are one spirit in one body. “God jealously yearns over the Spirit that He has made to dwell in you” (James 4:5). Bodies come and go; the Spirit is eternal.

In the third message (last week’s message), titled, “What has God been hiding?” We asked, “What has God been hiding?” I noticed that Jesus “laid aside his garments” when He washed the disciple’s feet. We know that, according to Scripture, we wear clothes because of our shame. But why did Jesus wear clothes? Did He have shame (unless of course, He wears me or mine)? Why did the Word of God hide himself in the body of a carpenter? Why did God hide Himself (eternity) behind the veil in the Temple (in space and time)? In eternity, He sees all of you, every moment in time.

What would happen if I (64-year-old Peter Hiett) were to travel back in time to Ms. Rydberg’s American Literature class in the fall of 1977 in my 16-year-old body and sit next to 16-year-old Susan Coleman and tell her how I really feel about her now?

What would’ve happened if I were to say, “Susan Coleman... Hiett. You are my temple; you are my home. Your body is my body, and my body is your body. I am you, and you are me; me is we, and I honestly would have no idea who I am without you. God creates me through you. You are literally my life; you are Jonathan, Elizabeth, Rebekah, Coleman, Sweet Baby James, and everyone in their world that is now our world. You have no idea how beautiful you are and how easy you are to love.”

If I had said that to her, in September of 1977, that would’ve been the last conversation that we ever had. She would’ve been “triggered.” And now you may be “triggered,” for you may be thinking, “I’m gay, or transgender, or married and divorced,” or “I’ve been abused and violated; I want that to be my story, but that is not my story!”

Respectfully, I would insist that you are wrong. For every day, in every way, in every place, in every moment in time, Jesus is sitting next to you, burning with Love for you. And so, you may say, “Why doesn’t He just tell me?” Well, maybe it’s because that is the way He feels about you, but that is not the way you feel about Him... yet. And so, He is romancing you. He’s taking you on a journey and inviting you to talk with Him, commune with Him, every day in the sanctuary of your soul.

Why doesn’t He just tell you? Maybe He is, all the time (that’s why He made time). You’ve already seen that He is “good for food and a delight to the eyes,” and so you have consumed Him like fruit taken from a tree. You’ve already seen that He is “to be desired to make one wise,” and so you’ve already used Him, trying to impress Him, which just kills Him and makes everything die. And You’ve already seen that He is “the Life” that you took, and so you’ve already run from Him and hidden yourself in fig leaves, shame, and fear. What you may not have yet seen is that He’s with you all the time; He’s the Seed in the fruit. And so, in your place of shame, He will show you that He is always Grace — Grace, which creates Faith, that is Life in you.

#1. What is the Commandment of the Father? Jesus.

#2. What are we hiding? That we cannot fulfill the Commandment.

#3. What has God been hiding? That He is the Commandment.

#4. Our question for our message today: How do we fulfill the Commandment?

It would be helpful to reread John 12:31-13:30. In John 13:31, John writes: “When [Judas] had gone out, Jesus said, ‘Now is the son of man glorified.’”

We want to say, “No, now is the Son of man shamed... And why do you keep calling yourself ‘Son of Man?’”

If God is Jesus’ Father, what does that make Man? His Mom! He said as much, “Whoever does the will of my Father... is my mother.”

He’s also “The Son of David,” the prototypical man. “Against you, you only, have I sinned, Oh God,” wrote David in Psalm 51, after being confronted by Nathan the prophet in 2 Samuel 12. David knew that it was the Lord he had violated in Bathsheba and murdered in Uriah. Having heard the Word, David repents. The Son of David dies. David “comforts” Bathsheba, and the Son of David is literally conceived in the place of David’s shame. Jesus is the Son of David that dies. Jesus is the Son of David that is born, builds the temple, and makes all things new.

In each and all of us, Christ is conceived in our place of shame. I think of it this way: The Word that is heard (Seed: Zora in Hebrew, Sperma in Greek) meets the Breath breathed into your soul in the beginning (Seed: Zora in Hebrew, Spora in Greek, the feminine noun), and the veil in the temple of your soul rips, and the Life in the Holy of Holies begins to fill the whole temple until the day that you are born out of this age and into our Home. In this way, the false self gives birth to the true; the old adam gives birth to the New; “I am not” gives birth to who it is that “I am” and you are. Nothing is wasted, and then I am free of me, and you of you, for all the glory goes to Him — Him in us.

“All times are present to God,” writes C.S. Lewis. “It may be that salvation consists not in the canceling of these eternal moments but in the perfected humility that bears the shame forever, rejoicing in the occasion which it furnished to God’s compassion and glad that it should be common knowledge to the universe. Perhaps in that eternal moment, St. Peter — he will forgive me if I am wrong — forever denies his Master. If so, it would indeed be true that the joys of Heaven are, for most of us in our present condition, ‘an acquired taste’ — and certain ways of life may render the taste impossible of acquisition. Perhaps the lost are those who dare not go to such a public place.”

It’s all in Scripture, but I learned most of it praying for a friend who had been a harlot, but God revealed to be His Bride. He once told her, “You have no idea how beautiful you are and how easy you are to love.” I have realized that her story is my story and our story.

#4. How do we fulfill the Commandment? He must fully fill us with Him. So...

We must each freely surrender to Love in the Sanctuary of our own soul.

We must sacrifice our fig leaves, flesh, lies, and ego.

We must receive the Word of Love in every moment of our space and time.

We must give birth to the Life of Christ, which is Who it is that each of us, and all of us, actually are: The Last Adam, The Living Temple, The Bride and Body of Christ.

We must... and we will, for the Romance of God is that powerful. “Now is the Judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will romance all people to myself,” – said Jesus, John 12:31-32.

Don’t change your life; give birth to it (Him).