Now before the feast of the Passover, Jesus, knowing that his time had come that he would depart from this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.
John 13:1 (WEB)
in its setting: John 13:1-5
1 Where we are
Caleb is nineteen and ten weeks into the programme. At ten past one on Sunday morning he is lying in the dark with the fan on, typing out what he wants to say to his mother into an app that answers in four seconds. It never sounds tired of him. It never brings it up again next week. This is the fourth night this week. Tomorrow morning she will be in the kitchen and he will say nothing at all. Underneath it is a quiet belief he has never put into words: that he is too much for a real person, and if he says it out loud to her face, she will sigh, and remember.
2 What the passage is doing
John sets his verse on the night before Passover, in a borrowed upstairs room. Jesus knows the hour has come. He knows one man at that table has already arranged the betrayal, and another will deny knowing him before morning. He is not loving people who are easy to love, and he is not being spared anything. Knowing all of it, he loves them the whole distance — then gets up, ties a towel round himself, and kneels down at their feet with a basin.
τέλος
telos · end, completion, the full extent
English "to the end" sounds like a stopping point, a date on a calendar. Telos is not where love runs out but where it arrives — the whole distance, nothing held back. John uses it of love that keeps going all the way into the cross. It is love measured by what it was willing to cost, not by how quickly it answered.
3 Taking it with you
You may be the one who works beside somebody like Caleb, and you have probably wondered the same thing about yourself: whether anyone would stay if they had the full picture. Here is what happened. God did not send a reply. He came into a body, sat at a table with people who would fail him within hours, and knelt on the floor. He let himself be inconvenienced all the way to a cross for you. Nothing you have told nobody is news to him, and he has not gone anywhere. So tomorrow, when your patience runs thin and you stay in the kitchen anyway, that costly, ordinary staying is the shape of the love that already holds you.
A prayer you can pray
Father, you know the things I have never said to anyone, and you have not turned away. Thank you that Jesus came into a body, and stayed at the table with people who would let him down. Give me courage to be known by one real person this week. And give me patience to stay with someone tonight when it costs me something. Amen.
Soli Deo Gloria — to God alone be the glory.
