When I was twelve, I went to a dance at my school. It was held in the cafeteria, where they folded up the lunch tables and brought in a DJ. The girls stood on one side of the room, the boys stood on the other. Every once in a while, somebody would bravely venture across this massive chasm to ask someone to dance, and then everybody would watch them. Perhaps you endured this particular form of torture at some point in your adolescence.
It is not pretty.
I remember walking up to a girl, whose name I can recall with clarity twenty-four years later, and asking her if she would like to dance with me. Those of you who have walked this road know the determination and fortitude it takes to leave the boys’ side, walk across the lunchroom-turned-dance-floor to the girls’ side, and make your request. It takes all that a young man has in him not to buckle under the enormity of the pressure. But I did it. I made it to the other side and asked her if she would like to dance with me.
Her response?
She burst into tears and ran into the girls’ bathroom, where she spent the rest of the evening.
Strange the things we remember, isn’t it?
But perhaps there’s a reason certain stories stay with us years later. It’s not just that they’re true in that they actually happened, but they’re true in the sense that they point to something else, to larger truths about how life is.
When I asked this girl to dance, I gave her the choice of saying yes or no. I gave her options. If she had said yes, all sorts of new possibilities would have opened up, namely my getting to dance with her. And then maybe another dance. And then maybe a phone call the next week. Perhaps passing some notes in class. Whatever it is that twelve-year-olds do in a “relationship.”
But if she said no, then things weren’t going to progress at all. And this was her decision, not mine. By extending myself to her in the invitation to dance, I took a great risk. I risked that she would say no and I would be left standing there on the girls’ side of the cafeteria humiliated.
Which is what happened.
I had to live with her decision.
I was at the mercy of her choice.
I had given her the power in the relationship, at least what there was of a relationship.
When you make a move toward a person, when you extend yourself to them,
when you invite them to do something,
when you initiate conversation,
you give them power.
Power to say yes or no.
Power to decide.
This is true from junior high dances to marriage proposals to inviting someone for coffee.
Everyone who has ever received a no knows exactly what I’m talking about.
The Invitation to Risk
Anytime we move toward another in any way, we are taking a risk. A risk that she may say no. Our gesture may not get returned. Our invitation may be rejected. Our love may not be reciprocated.
A few years ago I was on a trip with a friend, and we had just gotten on the plane and sat down and fastened our seatbelts, and the flight attendant was just about to tell us how to . . . fasten our seatbelts, when my friend leaned over to me and asked, “Remember that business trip I took to the East Coast a few weeks ago? Well, it wasn’t for business. I went to be with this woman I’ve been emailing.”
But he wasn’t done.
“And remember when my wife went out of town last weekend? I wasn’t alone in my house. The woman I’ve been emailing came and spent the weekend with me.”
Where do you go from there, when a friend drops a bomb like that? Needless to say, the trip had a dark cloud over it. I begged him on the return flight to leave the airport and go straight home and be honest with his wife. I promised to help find a counselor to guide them through this mess. But as I was saying goodbye to him, I realized I had a question that was more important than anything we had talked about. I asked him if he wanted to be married to his wife.
He said no.
As he said no, I had flashbacks of their wedding ceremony, the vows, the “till death do us part” section, all the friends and family who had been there. The dresses, the flowers, the toasts. The kiss.
So he went to his home, I went to mine. I had been back probably fifteen minutes when there was a knock at the door. I opened it, and there stood his wife, sobbing. She was trying to talk, but not much was coming out. She came in and sat on the couch between my wife and me, and we put our arms around her and she cried and she cried and she cried.
There are a lot of different ways to cry. There’s the “somebody close to you is dying” cry, the “confessing dark secrets” cry, the “I’m angry and want to kill or at least significantly maim someone” cry, the groom’s “my bride is coming down the aisle” cry, the “kid whose feelings have been hurt” cry. There’s the “car accident I could have died in but didn’t” cry. There’s even the “I just hit my thumb with the hammer and it hurts so much but I’m not going to cry, so little tears are forming in the corners of my eyes” cry. But her cry on that day was a kind of crying I have seen many times. It’s the cry of someone who has had their heart broken by a lover.
It comes from someplace else.
Someplace far inside a person, deep in the soul. It’s a cry with a certain ache. It’s the ache of a broken heart.
Behind the Wall
For thousands of years, the poets have known that love is risky. There’s a scene in the Song of Songs, a collection of poems in the Bible, where the woman sees her lover, whom she calls her “beloved,” and he’s coming toward her. She says, “Look! Here he comes, leaping across the mountains, bounding over the hills.”1
But when he makes it to her house, he can’t get in.
She says, “There he stands behind our wall, gazing through the windows, peering through the lattice.”
In the days these lines were written, people were often married as teenagers, so this courtship we’re reading of is probably between high school students. Kids.
Which explains the “our wall” part. She’s still living at home. She’s under her parents’ roof. She’s living with her brothers and sisters and probably her extended family—aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents.
Her life is safe. Predictable. Her family provides for her. Her father and her brothers protect her.
And what is this chap saying to her? He says, “Arise, my darling, my beautiful one, come with me.”
He’s inviting her to a new life. A life with him.
He continues,
“See! The winter is past;
the rains are over and gone.
Flowers appear on the earth;
the season of singing has come,
the cooing of doves is heard in our land.
The fig tree forms its early fruit;
the blossoming vines spread their fragrance.”
And then he repeats, “Arise, come, my darling; my beautiful one, come with me.”
He reminds her that it’s that time of the year. The time of new life, new growth, sprouting, budding, blooming. It’s as if he points to the explosion of spring going on all around them in nature and says to her, “This could be us!”
So much potential, adventure, possibility. This could be us! Come with me!
This guy doesn’t give up, does he? You at least want to give him points for trying. Especially the part about the doves. Gentlemen, try saying “cooing” with a straight face. You gotta hand it to the fella.
But enough about his invitation. Do you see the terrifying spot this puts her in?
Does she leave? Does she go to the door in the wall and walk through it to the other side?
Because it isn’t just a wall, it’s a way of life. If she says yes to his offer, she’s trading what she knows for the unknown.
What if it doesn’t work out?
What if he isn’t who he appears to be?
What if he’s making this pitch to girls all over town?
What if he hits her?
What if he goes to war next year and doesn’t return, ever?
This could all blow up in her face.
What if her family doesn’t think he’s right for her, and she goes anyway and it doesn’t work out? How agonizing would it be for her to hear from her relatives for the rest of her life, “I told you so”?
Love is risky.
If she decides to love him, she runs the huge risk that she might have her heart broken.
And this risk does not end with marriage, with going through the wall and leaving home.
Later in the Song of Songs, it appears that this couple is married. He comes to her at night. “Open to me . . . my darling . . . my head is drenched with dew, my hair with the dampness of the night . . .”2
Now there is all sorts of commentary by scholars on what is going on here, but the general belief is that he’s been gone—farming, fighting, traveling—doing something that has brought him back in the middle of the night. Normally he would stay somewhere else rather than wake her up. But he returns to their bedroom and knocks.
She responds, “I have taken off my robe—must I put it on again? I have washed my feet—must I soil them again?”
What’s interesting about her words is that they translate from the Hebrew language, “I have a headache.”3
This is the awkward, real-life stuff that happens every day in relationships. She’s tired, and getting out of bed right now seems like such a hassle. It’s been a long day, she’s exhausted. Her reaction is, “Anytime but now.”
But then she catches herself. Like we all do. Do you ever have those moments when you hear yourself talking, almost from outside of your body, and the second you finish, you’re already starting the next sentence, which is, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. Please forget I said that. What I meant was . . .”?
She says, “My heart began to pound for him. I arose to open for my beloved . . . but my beloved had left; he was gone.”
And then she adds, “My heart sank at his departure.”
She’s too slow, and he’s gone. He extended himself, he risked, he called to her from the other side of the door, and he got a no.
Who doesn’t know this feeling?
She discovers that he’s split, and she says, “I looked for him but did not find him.”
Now she’s the one risking, searching, trying to find him. And coming up empty.
The heart has tremendous capacity to love, and to ache. And this ache is universal.
Universal Sisterhood
You can put women from all over the world with nothing in common in a room together and they may not have a thing to talk about until one of them says, “And then he cheated on me,” and instantly you have universal sisterhood.
Think of the poems, songs, plays, movies, novels across the ages that have dealt with this pain. Everybody understands it.
Think about some of the great country songs, the classics. There’s “She Ripped My Heart Out and Stomped That Sucker Flat,” and there’s “I Sure Do Miss Him, but My Aim Is Improving,” and then there’s my personal favorite, “Here’s a Quarter, Call Someone Who Cares.”
What do they have in common?
Heartbreak.
Someone got their heart broken by someone else. And now they are singing about it. And we can all relate. Even if the music gives us a rash.4
Why is this? And why is it that it’s not just about lovers, it’s about parents and their children, friends who have been hurt by friends, business partners who part ways. Why is heartbreak so universal?
It’s universal because we’re feeling something as old as the world. Something God feels.
The Bible begins with God making people who have freedom. Freedom to love God or not to love God. And these people consistently choose not to love God. It’s written in Genesis 6:6 that God “regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled.”
Another translation reads, “Then YHWH [God] was sorry that he had made humankind on earth, and it pained his heart.”
These ancient writers saw God as having a heart.5
That feels.
That responds.
That hurts.
That fills with pain.
God . . . grieving.
And what is the source of this grieving?
People.
People God had made who have freedom. Freedom to love anybody they want. And freedom not to love anybody they want. God takes this giant risk in creating and loving people, and in the process God’s heart is broken.
Again and again and again.
Divine heartbreak.
For some, this is an entirely new perspective on God. Many of the popular images of God are of a warrior, a creator, a judge, a system of theology, a set of absolute truths, a father, the writer of an owner’s manual.
But a lover?
A lover whose heart has been crushed, and expresses it in . . . poetry?6
This raises questions about what is at the base of the universe. What, or maybe we should say who, is behind it all?
A list of rules?
A set of beliefs, which you either believe or you don’t, and if you do, you’re in, if you don’t, you’re out?
A harsh judge and critic, who’s making a list and checking it all the time?
An impersonal energy such as fate, destiny, luck, chance, or the force that you can tap into if you know the code or the technique or the philosophy?7
The story the Bible tells is of a living being who loves and who continues to love even when that love is not returned. A God who refuses to override our freedom, who respects our power to decide whether to reciprocate, a God who lets us make the next move.
Love Is . . .
Love is handing your heart to someone and taking the risk that they will hand it back because they don’t want it. That’s why it’s such a crushing ache on the inside. We gave away a part of ourselves and it wasn’t wanted.
Love is a giving away of power. When we love, we give the other person the power in the relationship. They can do what they choose. They can do what they like with our love. They can reject it, they can accept it, they can step toward us in gratitude and appreciation.
Love is a giving away. When we love, we put ourselves out there, we expose ourselves, we allow ourselves to be vulnerable.
Love is giving up control. It’s surrendering the desire to control the other person. The two—love and controlling power over the other person—are mutually exclusive. If we are serious about loving someone, we have to surrender all of the desires within us to manipulate the relationship.
So if you were God—which I realize is an odd way to begin a sentence—but if you were God, the all-powerful creator of the universe, and you wanted to move toward people, you wanted to express your love for the world in a new way, how would you do it?
If you showed up in your power and control and might, you would scare people off. This is what happens at the giving of the Ten Commandments.8 The first two commandments are in the first person: “You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an image . . . for I, the Lord . . .” But starting with the third commandment, someone else is talking: “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord . . .” The rabbis believed that this is because God was speaking directly to the people in the first two commands, but they couldn’t handle it. As it says in the text, “They trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance and said to Moses, ‘Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.’ ”9 So, the rabbis reasoned, the switch in person is because Moses gave them the remaining eight commandments.
Just God speaking is too much to bear.
If you’re God and you want to express ultimate love to your creation, if you want to move toward them in a definitive way, you have a problem, because just showing up overwhelms people.
You wouldn’t come as you are.
You wouldn’t come in strength.
You wouldn’t come in your pure, raw essence. You’d scare everybody away.
The last thing people would perceive is love.
So how would you express your love in an ultimate way? How do you connect with people in a manner that wouldn’t scare them off but would compel them to want to come closer, to draw nearer?
You would need to strip yourself of all of the trappings that come with ultimate power and authority. That’s how love works. It doesn’t matter if a man has a million dollars and wants to woo a woman, if she loves him for his money, it isn’t really love.
If you were an almighty being who made the universe and everything in it, you would need to meet people on their level, in their world, on their soil . . . like them.
This is the story of the Bible. This is the story of Jesus.
The Upside-Down Empire
Consider the story just for the sheer poetry of it. Jesus is born to teenage peasants under questionable circumstances. His mother gets pregnant before marriage.10 He’s born amid the dung and straw of a stable. He’s placed in a feeding trough.11 His brothers and sisters think he’s out of his mind,12 and after his first sermon in his hometown, the people he grew up with form a mob and try to kill him.13
And who does Jesus identify with? The outcasts, the people of the land who aren’t good enough, clean enough, wealthy enough, and pure enough to be a part of the establishment. He’s invited to dine with the elite and the rich, which he does numerous times, but he also eats with the lowest of the low—and he enjoys it. He enjoys them.
He touches people with infectious skin diseases,14 he lets questionable women touch him,15 he lays his hands on dead bodies,16 and he engages in conversation with promiscuous women alone in the middle of the day.17
His entire life is about the stripping away of power and control. Jesus always chooses the path of love, not power.
Inclusion, not exclusion.
Connection and solidarity rather than rank and hierarchy.
Touch rather than distance.
Compassion rather than control.
He comes on a donkey, not a horse.18
Weeping and broken, not proud and triumphant.19
This path Jesus has chosen, which he continues to choose day after day, takes on some ominous undertones. He finds himself at odds with those in power. Partway through the Gospels—the accounts of his life—he starts dropping hints that this path he’s on is going somewhere. Somewhere that involves suffering and even death. His hints, which start turning into predictions, are about a conflict that he sees as inevitable.20 A conflict between love and controlling power.
As we read the Gospels, we find Jesus’s message putting him more and more in conflict with the religious and political leaders of his day. He’s threatening their power. This is what love does, it threatens the empires of power and control and wealth and manipulation.
He’s eventually arrested and put on a sort of trial, at which he’s asked to perform miracles. He refuses, knowing that a display of his miraculous abilities would not be true to the path he’s on.21 He’s eventually beaten and flogged. When he doesn’t fight back, he’s mocked, and he doesn’t say anything in return. He’s hung on a cross and says, “I am thirsty.”22
Naked.
Bleeding.
Vulnerable.
Thirsty.
He even quotes a well-known prayer of the day, which includes the haunting line, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”23
It was explained this way in a popular first-century hymn, recorded in the book of Philippians: “[Jesus] who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing.”24
Strength and Weakness
This is not weakness as we think of weakness. Jesus knows exactly what he’s doing. There is a weakness that is truly weakness, that has nothing else to it—no depth, no intention, no greater purpose. But Jesus is intentional in what he’s doing. His vulnerability is for a purpose.
There is a weakness that is actually strength.
And there is a strength that is actually weakness.
Take, for example, a parent who yells at their children and holds them accountable for all sorts of random tasks they were supposed to have known to do and who allows their mood to dictate the mood of the whole house. This kind of parent dominates their family with manipulative behavior and petty punishments that create chaos and insecurity for those around them. This kind of parent is using their strength, but they are actually weak. They do this because in truth, they’re broken, confused, and insecure. They have no idea what they’re doing, as a parent or as a person.
The same is true for managers and bosses and teachers and anyone who uses their position of authority to coerce or manipulate or bully others. They can get people to do what they want, but it’s only because of the position they hold. Their authority is rooted in nothing larger or stronger or higher than their rank. And that can be taken away tomorrow. They may appear strong, but they are actually weak.
Contrast this with people who appear weak but are actually quite strong. It’s when someone says something mean or cutting about us and everything within us wants to one-up them with an even nastier comment in return, thus winning the exchange, but we hold our tongue. We “lose” the round, but what we did took tremendous strength. And it would take even more strength to forgive them and then maybe even love them. It would all appear quite weak to the observer, unless they understood that what they were witnessing was actually strength in action.
It takes quite a spine to turn the other cheek.
It takes phenomenal fortitude to love your enemy.
It takes firm resolve to pray for those who persecute you.25
This isn’t true just on an individual, relational level. It’s true for families and people groups and even nations. Consider Ghandi, who is famous for his commitment to nonviolence. Think about what he accomplished. A short, bald man from India wearing a white robe and spectacles stood up to the British Empire.26
And won.
Without a gun.
This appeared at the time to be incredibly weak, but history teaches us, in this and many other cases, that there is a better way.
It’s a way that may appear weak, but it is actually strong.
Take, for example, the Roman soldiers who flogged, mocked, beat, and then nailed Jesus to the execution stake. Soldiers in the army, earning a decent wage, spending another day at work in the far reaches of the empire, taking care of another Jew who has caused some sort of ruckus about rules and rituals and religion that makes very little sense to a sophisticated Roman. These soldiers exercise power over Jesus in killing him, but it’s hollow and ungrounded strength. They are serving no greater cause than their masters’ conquering more lands and building larger armies and gaining more power and wealth. The whips and hammers and nails and stakes are in the service of no greater ideal than simple human greed. It is, in the end, pointless.
Jesus is calling all of this into question. He sees it for the lie that it is and is willing to go the whole way to resist it. Including his own death. He is confronting an entire system of rank and exclusion and hierarchy that says some people are better than others and some people are worth more than others, and some are good enough for God and some aren’t, and some should triumph while others suffer at their expense.
In Jesus’s public exposure, he exposes the lie of the empire.
In Jesus’s vulnerability, he shows how vulnerable the “strength” of power and corruption really are.
In Jesus’s thirst, he shows us how greed will always leave us thirsting for more.
In Jesus’s emptiness, he shows us how empty the way of the world really is.
It’s all upside down: an obscure Jewish rabbi challenging a world-dominating regime, and yet several days later, rumors spread that’s he’s risen from the dead.
Perhaps this is why one of the soldiers at his execution starts to believe. He sees the two paths laid out before him. And in the midst of the blood and tears and suffering, he gets a glimpse of a better way.27
If there is a God who loves us and has acted in history to express that love, what would it look like?
This is what I mean by the sheer poetry of the Jesus story. Jesus is God coming to us in love. Sheer unadulterated, unfiltered love. Stripped of everything that could get in the way. Naked and vulnerable, hanging on a cross, asking the question, “What will you do with me?”
Me Too
This is why for thousands of years Christians have found the cross to be so central to life. It speaks to us of God’s suffering, God’s pain, God’s broken heart. It’s God making the first move and then waiting for our response.
If you have ever given yourself to someone and had your heart broken, you know how God feels.
If you have ever given yourself to someone and found yourself waiting for their response, exposed and vulnerable, left hanging in the balance, you know how God feels.
If you have ever given yourself to someone and they responded, they reciprocated with love of their own, you know how God feels.
The cross is God’s way of saying, “I know what it’s like.”
The execution stake is the creator of the universe saying, “I know how you feel.”
Our tendency in the midst of suffering is to turn on God. To get angry and bitter and shake our fist at the sky and say, “God, you don’t know what it’s like! You don’t understand! You have no idea what I’m going through. You don’t have a clue how much this hurts.”
The cross is God’s way of taking away all of our accusations, excuses, and arguments.
The cross is God taking on flesh and blood and saying, “Me too.”
This can transform our experience of heartbreak. Instead of being something that distances us from God, causing us to question, “Where are you?,” we can see that every poem by a lover spurned, every song sung with an ache, every movie with a gut-wrenching scene, every late-night conversation and empty box of Kleenex are glimpses into the life of God.
Our first need is not for people to fix our problems. People who charge in and have all the answers and try to make things right without first joining us in our pain generally annoy us, or worse yet, they push us away. They have nothing to give us. The God that Jesus points us to is not a god who stands at a distance, wringing his hands and saying, “If only you’d listened to me.”
This is the God who holds out his hands and asks, “Would you like to see the holes where the nails went? Would that help?”
It’s the place we find out we’re not alone, where we find strength to go on. Not a strength that comes from within ourselves but a strength that comes from God. The God who keeps going. Who keeps offering. Who keeps loving. Who keeps risking.
A God who knows what it’s like.
The cross is where we present our wounds to God and say, “Here, you take them.”
Our healing begins when we participate in the suffering of God. When we don’t avoid it but enter into it, and in the process enter into the life of God. When we see our pain not as separating us from but connecting us to our maker.
And in this connection, there’s always the chance we’ll find a reason to risk again.
If God can continue to risk, then maybe we can too.
Perhaps you have had your heart broken by somebody. You risked and extended and offered yourself, and they rejected and turned away and didn’t return your love.
There is something divine in your suffering.
Somebody divine in your pain.
You know how God feels.
Really good, loving people get hurt. It’s how things are.
Maybe you’re living in the wake of a relationship that fell apart. You have to dig those moments up. The parts that hurt and the awkward conversations and the anger and the failure and the misunderstanding and the betrayal. You have to dig them up and acknowledge them before you are ever going to heal.
The danger is that you will decide it isn’t worth it. Why risk if it’s going to hurt like this? The tragedy would be for you to shut down, to allow a wall to be built around your heart, and for something within you to die.
A decision not to risk again is a decision not to love again. They go together.
Why is it those we love the most are the ones capable of hurting us the most? Our greatest wounds rarely come from strangers. They probably come from an ex-fiancé, a former friend, a roommate, a sister, a business partner.
Even in healthy relationships, an offhanded comment or a rolling of the eyes can cripple us for days or years or even a lifetime. This is because the more we open ourselves up, the more vulnerable we are. The more exposed we are, the more it hurts. The more we let someone in, the greater the risk. Surprise, anger, shock, betrayal, helplessness—it all gets mixed in together.
There’s a phrase that I have heard used to explain how God loves everybody equally. People say that “the ground at the foot of the cross is level.” The idea is that God has no favorites, that no matter where you’re coming from and what you’ve done and who you’ve been with and how badly you’ve screwed it up, the cross is the place where God looks past it all and forgives and accepts and wipes the slate clean.
It’s a beautiful idea, really.
So the statement works as a truth about God’s power. God’s power to liberate and cleanse and forgive and grant new life, new hope, new mercy. God’s power to take something that appears hopeless and redeem it. But the statement could also be seen in a totally different light.
The ground at the foot of the cross is level for God too.
In matters of love, it’s as if God has agreed to play by the same rules we do. God can do anything—that’s what makes God, God. But God can’t do everything. God can’t make us love him—that’s our choice.
Love is risky for God too.
Which is a bit like a boy asking a girl to dance.28