Where Does Your Love Stop?

Everyone's love has a stopping point.

We love people until they have disappointed us one too many times. We love people until loving them costs more than we are willing to pay. We love people until it threatens something we are protecting — our comfort, our reputation, our sense of fairness. We reach the edge, and we stop.

Most of us don't announce it. We just quietly pull back. We do the minimum. We keep our distance. We tell ourselves we've done enough.

The question isn't whether your love has a stopping point. It does. So does mine. The question is what we do about it.

A Love That Didn't Stop

On the night before his crucifixion, Jesus gathered with his disciples for the Passover meal. John, who wrote the account, tells us something striking before the story even begins. He says that Jesus, knowing his hour had come, loved his disciples "to the end."

That phrase — "to the end" — translates a Greek word, telos, that means more than simply "until the last moment." It carries the sense of completion, of something reaching its intended destination. A love moving toward its fulfillment. A love that is going all the way.

And then Jesus gets up from the table, ties a towel around his waist, and washes his disciples' feet.

John makes a point of telling us what Jesus knew when he did this: that the Father had given all things into his hands, that he had come from God and was returning to God. The Lord of everything knelt on the floor and washed the dirt from his disciples' feet. Not because he had to. Because his love was moving toward its completion and had not yet arrived.

The Night of Betrayal

Here is the detail that makes this story almost unbearable.

Jesus knew, as he knelt with the basin and the towel, exactly what was about to happen. He knew that Judas was about to hand him over to the authorities. He knew that Peter, sitting at the table, would deny him three times before morning. He knew that when the soldiers came, all of them would scatter and leave him to face his death alone.

He washed their feet anyway. He took the bread and broke it anyway. He poured the cup and gave it to them anyway.

The love that knelt in the Upper Room did not stop there. It continued through the arrest, through the trial, through the beatings, through the nails. It continued until Jesus, hanging on the cross, spoke a final word that shares the same root as telos: tetelestai. Finished. Complete. There was nothing left to give.

The foot washing and the cross are not two separate events. They are one continuous act of love that began moving toward its fulfillment in the Upper Room and did not stop until it was done.

A New Standard

Before the night is over, Jesus gives his disciples a commandment.

"Love one another," he says, "as I have loved you."

Notice the standard. Not "as you love yourself," which is already asking a great deal. The standard is "as I have loved you" — the kind of love that washes feet on the way to a Roman cross, the kind that gives itself on the night of betrayal, the kind that does not stop.

That is a different category of love entirely. It is not something we can produce on our own. If you have ever tried to love someone through repeated disappointment, through the cost exceeding what felt reasonable, through the moment when stopping would have been entirely justified, you know how quickly our own resources run out.

Come as You Are

The good news of Maundy Thursday is not primarily that Jesus has set a high standard for us to reach. The good news is that the love which went all the way to the cross was given to people who did not deserve it, on the very night they proved they didn't.

Which means it is given to us too.

We cannot manufacture this kind of love from within ourselves. But we can receive it. And what the Christian life offers is precisely this: a love given to us so that it can begin to move through us toward the people around us — even the ones who have disappointed us, even the ones whose love for us has its own stopping point, even the ones for whom loving is costly.

You don't have to have it all figured out. You don't have to pretend your love hasn't stopped short somewhere. Come as someone who needs to receive before they can give.

That is exactly who this love was meant for.

We'd love to have you join us at St. Dunstan's. If you're carrying a relationship where your love has stopped short, or if you're simply wondering what a love that doesn't stop actually looks like, you are welcome here. Click the button below to plan your visit. You can also read, watch, or listen to Fr. Michael's full sermon on this topic over on his Substack if you want to go deeper.