Since coming to Oregon I have experienced the scourge known as blackberries. In the Midwest last week, friends asked me if I picked a lot of blackberries. They had seen the mile after mile of unpicked roadside blackberries and could not understand my lack of thriftiness. I explained that, once the canes and I had had personal encounters (the canes won) and I entered the war on keeping them out of my yard, I did not so much see these thickets as food to be put aside for the winter, so much as I saw them as kin to the enchanted thorn thicket around Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Blackberries have become a symbol to me of that which will not go away. I have come to respect these enemies of mine, the blackberries. Their aggressive naturalizing by root runners is insidious and impressive. I’ve gone over my yard, hacking out the big canes, following the runners, plucking out the shoots. I have taken every last morsel of blackberry leaf out of my yard, only to go back the next day to be surprised by new canes. They just will not go away. And this, my friends, is like God’s love for us.

Sure, preacher! That’s taking a metaphor too far. How is God’s love like the noxious blackberry cane? Isn’t that sacrilege? Listen. Charlotte and I will have a theological conversation—a catechism—based on John 15 to help you decide for yourselves whether God’s love isn’t persistent and demanding.

According to Jesus, what is the “chain of command” for love? God starts it by loving Jesus, who shows his love and communion with the One he called “Father” by responding with obedience, even to death. Jesus tells us that because God loves him, he loves us. We know that Jesus loves us because we experience joy in friendship with him.

What does it mean to be Jesus’ friend? We are chosen by Jesus for an extraordinary, two-way intimate relationship. Our commitment to and trust in Jesus requires service and loving faithfulness—not to him, but to other people.

How are friends different than servants? Friendship with Jesus is not spiritual “upward mobility,” Friendship with Jesus means knowing God, not in the sense that we “know” what God knows. By what Jesus said and did, we are able to know and experience the godliness of the One in whose image we are created.

What is God’s “godliness” and what does it do for us? We know God as righteous and just, merciful and redeeming, joyful and sorrowful. Through our friend-ship with Jesus, as we become more like him, it is a foregone conclusion that when we pray, we ask for what pleases God. In this way, whatever we ask in Jesus’ name we are given.

What is the significance of Jesus choosing us as friends? God starts all of this by loving us, but because Jesus chose us, hangs onto us, we are able to stick to our task when the going gets rough. Being chosen is not a matter of privilege. We were chosen to keep Jesus’ commandment.

What is the commandment we are to keep? Jesus’ commandment is to love each other in the same way that he loved us. This command is so powerful that, just because we know Jesus gives it, the result is that we love each other. When we follow the example of Jesus, who loved the undeserving disciples, we are able to love even those who do not deserve our love.

What do we gain from keeping his commandment to love? This love is not about what we gain or about fulfilling our needs. This love wants the very best for the other and does not care about hierarchy—who is up and who is down. This love is not an emotion to be commanded, but it is about giving ourselves away, about knowing and being known.

Now, that catechism might not convince you that I’m justified in telling you that God’s love is as insinuating and invasive, as maddening, as difficult to manage as blackberries. Certainly, we wouldn’t think God’s love for us was unwelcome. Although, if we are brutally honest, we have to admit that sometimes God’s love is uncomfortable and demanding. Especially that thing about fruit and loving others.

I once heard a bootleg tape of a retreat given by Jean Vanier. Vanier isn’t famous in the People magazine sense of famous, but he’s a living saint. He founded L’Arche, the international faith communities in which disabled people live and are cared for. L’Arche is a profound living-out of Jesus’ gospel, a raw and sometimes heart-breaking way to experience God’s love in human lives. In this tape, Vanier says the basic human question is, “Do you love me?” All our interactions with each other, he says, boil down to that question. Our search for God, the deepest most important question, maybe the only question really worth asking is, “Do you love me?” Making up with your friend after a fight. Trying to do well in school. Entering a roomful of strangers. Working to excel at your favorite sport. Do you love me? Getting the teacher’s attention—me, me, I can answer that! Volunteering to work overtime on holidays. Serving on the volunteer board. Whispering answers to your friend. Eating lunch with the movers and shakers. Fresh cookies after school. Do you love me?

It’s a legitimate question. It is the cry of our hearts. Christians already know the answer. We don’t need to always be perfect, we don’t need to run away so our parents will chase us. We know the answer. We are already loved. We can still ask the question —we need to ask the question—but Jesus tells us to ask it in new ways, as people who already know the answer. The visible answer, what other people see about us, may remain the same, but the reason “why” may change. For example, do I volunteer because I need to be needed? Or do I volunteer because I know God loves me so much that I must pass it on?

Our heads know the answer. We’ve got Bible verses to prove it. It’s our gut that wants to experience the answer. Our gut needs assurance that we are loved. But we keep cutting deals, giving God leading questions to give us the answer we want. If God really loved me . . . I would have done better on the test. My mother would not have gotten sick. The baby would have lived. My spouse would stop drinking. God knows we need reassurance, but we’re never going to get it if we insist on steering, if we refuse to move out in faith to try something risky. God’s love makes demands. Jesus says we need to “bear fruit.” That’s Biblish for “try to be like Jesus.” Move out of your comfort zone. Love someone who doesn’t deserve it. That command to bear fruit isn’t for God’s sake. God doesn’t need our puny efforts to bring about the kingdom. God needs us to be kingdom people. But God uses our puny efforts to assure each other of the answer to the question, “Do you love me?” Loving each other is not burdensome when you think of it as, “I am God’s love to this person.” Not, “How am I going to feel loved?” but “How can I show love to this other in the name of God?”

So, yeah. God’s love for us is as persistent as the blackberry canes. We are defenseless against God’s invasive, pervasive, relentless love. And that’s good news. But here’s where the metaphor stops working. Unlike blackberry canes, God’s love is not only for our good, it is for us to give away. Thanks be to God.