While the command to love is old, the demands of love will always be as new as the moment at hand and the person in front of you. It may even be that love is not the action, so much as it is the curious attention itself.
This passion Gospel just read in parts reveals a different sort of God – the God who endures betrayal, incarceration, and torture, the God who is moved by and weeps over the plight of humanity. God is the Rock of our salvation, but God is also a Rock who weeps.
But when we keep Jesus a little strange, maybe we can live more like Mary, opening ourselves to whatever extravagant gift an encounter with the living God might draw out of us. A gift we’ve not yet imagined, perhaps. A gift our rational, sense-making selves might rule out before it’s ever called forth.
We read these stories over and over again not because we think they’ll turn out differently but because we find ourselves in the stories and we get a glimpse in them of what we can bear.