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Sunday
In today’s Gospel lesson Jesus, knowing that those who love him will soon be bereft, gives them vital instruction. After delivering a discouraging message–“Where I am going, you cannot come”–he follows up with “a new commandment” intended to help them through the hard times–“that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
Because my mind has been on the Pre-Raphaelite poets recently–I’ve been rereading A.S. Byatt’s Possession for the first time in 40 years—the ending of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market comes to mind when I read Jesus’s words. Lizzy has heroically come to her sister’s rescue, sacrificing herself in a Christ-like manner to save Laura from goblin addiction and emptiness. The poem’s epilogue informs us that, years later, Laura recalls this great love for their children. The passage melts my heart every time I read it:
Days, weeks, months, years
Afterwards, when both were wives
With children of their own;
Their mother-hearts beset with fears,
Their lives bound up in tender lives;
Laura would call the little ones
And tell them of her early prime,
Those pleasant days long gone
Of not-returning time:
Would talk about the haunted glen,
The wicked, quaint fruit-merchant men,
Their fruits like honey to the throat
But poison in the blood;
(Men sell not such in any town):
Would tell them how her sister stood
In deadly peril to do her good,
And win the fiery antidote:
Then joining hands to little hands
Would bid them cling together,
“For there is no friend like a sister
In calm or stormy weather;
To cheer one on the tedious way,
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To lift one if one totters down,
To strengthen whilst one stands.”
Or as John puts it (15:13), “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
