Love at Drop-Offs and in the Upper Room

There’s a tradition, or I suppose I should call it a rule, in my family: Everyone has to say “I love you” at school drop-off, or else. 

It goes something like this: my boys, ages ten and twelve, and I will be driving to school. Sometimes we’re listening and singing along to music; other times we’re talking about homework and practice schedules. Sometimes we’re asking questions about the days and weeks ahead; sometimes we’re trying out jokes; sometimes we’re just not getting along. 

Whatever it is, whatever the situation on any one particular morning, when I say “I love you” right before I pull up to the sidewalk at the middle school, and then a few minutes later, at the elementary school, each of them has to say “I love you, too” or else I have permission to roll down the window and yell “I LOVE YOU, SON!” at the top of my lungs. 

It’s an idea stolen straight from one of our favorite movies, Miles Morales. Just as Miles’ dad does not hold back from prompting his son to say “I love you, too” into the siren speaker of his police car in front of his kid’s New York City school, I make no apologies for the last words we say to one another before work gobbles up my day and classes gobble up theirs—before another seven hours goes by and we see one another again. 

Really, I am just being their mama who loves them, who yearns to cushion them in love and support. So, I do my best to send them off in love, and let them know, in one tiny little blip of a two-second sentence, that they are loved for exactly who they are, as they are. 

Similarly, as I sat with today’s readings, I kept going back to a picture of farewell. 

Perhaps not dissimilar to school drop-offs in the mornings, a lot happens in a short amount of time when Jesus gathers with his friends in the Upper Room on Maundy Thursday. The scene feels slightly chaotic, to say the least: Jesus washes his disciples’ feet, predicts Judas’s betrayal, feeds them bread and wine, predicts Peter’s denial, promises his disciples the Holy Spirit, and commands them to love one another. 

But also? The mood feels jarring, perhaps because it entirely is. This is no ordinary goodbye. A wild kind of desperation tinges his words because time is running out. There won’t be another time to say everything he needs to say—to send them off in love, one might say. To give them one last promise, one last commandment, so they might really truly know that they are loved for exactly who they are, as they are. 

Later, when Jesus talks to his father, his words feel heavy and disjointed, rambling and mournful—and why wouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t he feel this way when he utters his final goodbyes to the Twelve, and “every word, deed, and gesture he has offered them is weighted with grief”?     

I suppose such bright sadness is understandable when we remember how much Jesus loved the men gathered before him. Because when love enters the equation, how easily grief can start to take up space too. 

In the poem “Maundy Thursday” by Malcolm Guite, just as the “fire dances” and the “water cleanses,” so also does Jesus show us the full extent of love: 

            To us whose love is always incomplete,

            In vain we search the heavens high above,          

            The God of love is kneeling at our feet. 

            Though we betray Him, though it is the night. 

            He meets us here and loves us into light. 

It’s a love made real by the grief of goodbyes, as Jesus sends the disciples off in love. It’s a love tinged with tears of sadness, entirely because he loved them and they loved him in return—because he loves us and we love him in return, once again.  

But also, it’s a love that “meets us here and loves us into light,” that dares us sit with the darkness of tomorrow and the light that is to come. 

For it’s a love that is always complete. 

---