The Speed of Love
December 10, 2024 | By Jack Batten BF ‘27
image description: boat drifting on water
Sound moves at 767 miles per hour, while light moves at 670 million miles per hour. Beethoven’s Pathetique sonata is usually played at 70 beats per minute, while Charlie Parker’s Anthropology clocks in at a blistering 304. The cheetah routinely runs over 70 miles per hour, while the peregrine falcon has broken 240 in a dive. My mom averages about 90 on the highway, while my dad is a less frightening 72. But scientists have never managed to measure God’s speed.
Or have they?
In his 1979 book The Three Mile an Hour God, Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama notes the fact that Jesus Christ walked at three miles per hour during His time on earth. Jesus never set foot in an airplane, car, or motorboat; He never even rode a horse or chariot. The fastest He traveled was in a creaking rowboat or on a shambling donkey. For the vast majority of His life, Jesus walked. And like all humans, Jesus averaged three miles per hour. Even for His time, Jesus seems to have been a slow and meandering walker. In Mark 5, the synagogue leader Jairus runs to Jesus, sweating and panting, and implores Him to heal his daughter, who is near death. But Jesus, not seeming to sense the urgency of the situation, gradually follows Jairus to his home, which is surrounded by an unruly crowd that blocks his steps at every turn.
When they are halfway from the house, Jesus comes to a sudden stop, and the entire crowd grinds to a halt. His disciples try to urge their rabbi along, while Jairus is left counting down his daughter’s final minutes. But Jesus has noticed a chronically ill woman in the crowd and takes the time to heal her even as the messengers come running with news that Jairus’s daughter has died. Then, Jesus takes His time walking to the dead girl’s bedside, where He dismisses the mourners, takes her hand, and tells her to get up. The dead girl stretches, yawns, and opens her eyes, the clock of her life rewound, having received the gift of time from the immortal God.
Jesus is never in a rush. Jesus walks at three miles an hour, and He never hesitates to stop
along the way. He takes His time.
There is lots of walking at Yale, but very little of it is slow and leisurely. There is more rushing from HQ to Science Hill or from the Franklin dining hall to WLH than there is taking in the architecture or strolling with a friend. Meals are cut short when you have to rush off to a seminar on the emperor Claudius, and showers are like running through a sprinkler when there is a chemistry p-set to finish. We hurry up the career ladder, dashing from internship to graduate school to corporate job as quickly as the job market will allow. Time is money, and we’re broke in both currencies. Yale is a fast-moving place.
Scottish theologian John Swinton draws a connection between God’s pace and God’s love. “In a culture of speed,” he writes, “we forget that love takes time, and that love is slow.” Jesus took time to get to know people that no one else wanted to look at, never mind become friends with. He would go far out of His way to visit a backwater village.
One of the groups often left behind by this “culture of speed” is people with disabilities, as Swinton notes. People with dementia, Down Syndrome, or profound disabilities lack the productivity, savvy, and mobility so valued in the Ivy League. Many people with disabilities move at a slower pace, physically and intellectually.
“To be with people living with dementia,” writes Swinton, “you need to slow down and take time for those things that the world considers to be trivial. When you do this, you will be surprised—and probably amazed—at what you discover, as you encounter people in the slowness of God’s love.”
In John 4, Jesus stops by a well and lingers there for a whole morning while His disciples hurry along to a nearby city. He sits on the edge of the well all morning until a woman comes along. Jesus asks for a drink from the well, and they have a long conversation. He never rushes her, never says “well, I should probably be going,” even though lunchtime has come and gone and He never did get that drink.
A speedy love is no love at all. We know that shotgun marriages soon fall apart, but we shoot off shotgun conversations, shotgun emails, shotgun calls home. We lose patience with the confused-looking guy in our biology discussion section until he eventually gives up asking questions. We talk over the beginner playing on the common room piano until he leaves so the real pianists can take over. We sneer at the freshman from North Dakota who doesn’t know what “consulting” is, or laugh at our awkward, balding history TF. We surround ourselves with youthful people, attractive people, talented and ambitious people. We go months without seeing anyone under the age of eighteen, or anyone over the age of thirty-five who isn’t a professor. We rarely interact with anyone who has a disability; many of us would struggle to name friends who have disabilities.
Ragtime composer Scott Joplin’s biggest regret was that performers always darted through his pieces at warp speed. When I played his 1908 piece Pine Apple Rag a few years ago, I noticed a box in the top left corner that said in bold font: NOTE: Do not play this piece fast. Composer. Joplin felt that performers were neglecting the true artistic value of his music by making a performance an opportunity to show off their speed. In the same way, we devalue our relationships when we rush through them, treating those around us as distractions on the way to something bigger and better.
So how do we slow down our breakneck pace? How do we rediscover a slow, gentle love?
Hitting the brakes on the speed of our love requires a long look at Love himself. Christ’s love is slow and steady. Because an eternal God slowed down and took the time to walk beside us, to love us, to die for us, we can slow down and better love God and other people.
The infinite God became bound by time for our salvation. Christ staggered up Calvary under the weight of His cross for our reconciliation. The Creator left His throne and walked along muddy footpaths so that we could join Him in the eternal dance. Far too often we neglect this reality. The prospect of the career, the relationship, the grade we are striving for often overtakes the glorious reality of what Christ has done for us. And the pressure—the ticking of the clock, the impending deadlines—weighs on our mind constantly. But what if we let the reality of an eternity of glory, of a slow and steady love, relieve the pressure of these burdensome countdowns?
Consider the lilies, Jesus said: they stay rooted in the same patch of soil and still God provides everything they need. Consider the little girl with Down Syndrome: she is neither productive nor useful in the eyes of the world, but God’s glory shines through her nevertheless. Consider the elderly: their movement is constrained by arthritic joints and bad backs, but their wisdom and perseverance are beautiful in the eyes of their Creator.
Consider God’s love for you. The story of Love incarnate is a long, slow narrative, spanning from “let there be light” to the final trumpet’s blast. Like a knight from Arthurian legend, God trudged through deserts, parted seas, fought the forces of evil, was betrayed, and gave His own life to win back His beloved.
God has taken His time in this mission—it has been millennia since the voice on Sinai, the songs of David, the angels outside the empty tomb. It may be millennia more before the skies split open and heaven comes roaring down to earth. But once Love takes hold of His beloved, only eternity itself will be long enough to contain the span of His love.
In his poem “On meeting Time,” seventeenth-century English poet George Herbert writes of an encounter between himself and Time. Time expects Herbert to flee in terror from his scythe and frightening features, but Herbert cheerfully explains to the hooded figure how Christ’s coming has dulled Time’s edge:
And in [Christ’s] coming thou art blessed,
For where thou only were before
An executioner at best;
Thou art a gardener now, and more,
An usher to convey our souls
Beyond the utmost stars and poles.
Time is no longer an executioner, but rather a gardener. His hatchet is a pair of pruning shears, his hearse a chariot to glory. Herbert concludes: “Of what strange length must that needs be, / Which even eternity excludes!” In Herbert’s theology, God’s love spills over the bounds of eternity. For time demands an end, and this will never do for God. Though Time’s ravages may rack us, in the end, Time is only the stage on which Love performs, the pen with which Love writes His story.
God’s love is time-bound but not time-contained. That is, God willingly loves us in the here and now, but unlike everything else we experience in time, His love has no expiration date, no half-life, no end. Love is not constrained by time. Love takes time.
The pace of our world now, more than ever, demands a slow and steady love. We need the one who is the Alpha and Omega, beginning and end, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Only when we are pierced by the slow and steady love of Love Himself can we gain the patience to love God and those around us.
1. Sarah McPherson. “Cheetah Guide.” March 29, 2022. https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/mammals/mammal-cheetah-guide-facts.
2. Mike Dilger. “Peregrine Falcon Guide.” May 17, 2023. https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/birds/peregrine-falcon-facts.
3. Kosuke Koyama. The Three Mile an Hour God. 1979.
4. John Swinton. “God walks at three miles an hour.” April 5, 2019. https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2019/5-april/comment/opinion/god-walks-at-three-miles-an-hour.
5. Ibid.
6. George Herbert. The Temple. 1633.
7. Ibid.