How Can We Love More Like Jesus?
On friendship, touch, longing, sex, and the sacred strangeness of being close
I don’t experience love in neat categories. Platonic, romantic, spiritual, familial, erotic, devotional: for me, they blur into one large weather system. That confusion has made me wonder whether the problem is me, or whether our culture has made the wrong map. Maybe intimacy was never supposed to mean only sex. Maybe Jesus shows us a kind of closeness that is embodied, tender, loyal, emotionally intense, and still not owned by desire.
We act like sex is the receipt that proves love happened, but Jesus seemed far more interested in whether love washed feet, stayed awake, broke bread, taught to fish, told the truth, and remained present.
Now, make no mistake.
The Gospels do not depict Jesus as sexually involved with his disciples, but they absolutely depict him as emotionally and physically close in ways that we modern Christians often sanitize into beige church pamphlet energy.
In John 13, the beloved disciple is described as reclining close beside Jesus at the meal, and some translations render the scene with language like leaning on Jesus’ chest or bosom...
Bible Odyssey also summarizes the beloved disciple’s first appearance at the Last Supper as "reclining at Jesus’s bosom."
Ancient dining posture explains part of it: meals were often eaten while reclining, not sitting upright at modern chairs, so the physical closeness was not romantic or sexual.
But even after accounting for culture, the image still matters. Jesus’s love was not sterile. It had breath, proximity, food, tears, real intimacy between bodies, and trust.
Jesus washed his disciples’ feet in John 13, a deeply embodied act of service and humility.
He called his disciples friends, not servants, and connected friendship with revelation: letting them know what he had received from the Father.
He wept publicly at Lazarus’s death, and the people watching interpreted that grief as evidence of love.
So intimacy, in Jesus terms, might be less “who do I get to have?” and more “who do I allow myself to truly behold, serve, grieve, and stay near?”
Maybe sex is so confusing because it is one of the few places where the body tries to say what the soul has been screaming.
And maybe another attempt at celibacy, for me, is not a rejection of intimacy. Maybe it is my attempt to learn whether love can remain love when it is not allowed to become consumption.
Why is this instinct so hard for humans to overcome, even when humanity claims to be reaching for something higher?
Humans can discipline desire, but we cannot delete longing. Sex is tied to survival, yes, but also to attachment, comfort, selfhood, validation, fear of abandonment, and the ancient ache to merge with something outside ourselves. We are not just brains dragging bodies around. We are bodies. We are mammals with souls. We are theology in nervous systems.
So... Maybe loving like Jesus means:
letting people be close without trying to own them.
letting love be intense without making it automatically romantic.
honoring the body without worshiping desire.
serving people without secretly trying to purchase their devotion.
learning boundaries not as walls, but as trellises.
letting friendship be holy again.
I have never been good at sorting love into clean little jars.
Friend love. Family love. Romantic love. Spiritual love. The kind of love where you want to sit beside someone forever and never touch them. The kind where you want to crawl inside their rib cage and redecorate. The kind where you want to feed them soup, wash their laundry, pray over their nervous system, hold their hand, kiss their forehead, and also maybe run away to the woods because suddenly everything feels too holy and too human at the same time.
I used to think this meant something was wrong with me. Maybe I was too intense. Maybe I was confusing platonic love with romantic love. Maybe I was making everything weird.
But then I started thinking about Jesus.
Jesus did not love people from a respectable distance. He ate with them. Touched them. Wept over them. Washed their feet. Called them friends. Let one of them recline close to him at dinner. Built a whole ministry out of proximity.
So now I wonder if the problem is not that I feel too many kinds of love at once. Maybe the problem is that we have inherited a culture that only knows what to do with love once it becomes romance, sex, marriage, or ownership.
I am still learning how to love like Jesus.
Not perfectly. Not cleanly. Not without confusion.
But I think I am learning that holy love does not have to be cold love. It does not have to be detached, sanitized, or afraid of the body. Jesus was not afraid of closeness. He was not afraid of tears, meals, touch, friendship, grief, or devotion.
Maybe the question is not, “Is this platonic or romantic?”
Maybe the deeper question is, “Is this love making me more free, more honest, more gentle, more alive, more like Christ?”
And if it is, maybe I do not have to name it perfectly before I honor it. Maybe I can simply hold it with clean hands, wash its feet, and pray for it.