To My Hindu Friend Who Loves Krishna

Dear friend,

I've always loved that Krishna loses. In the stories of him wrestling and playing with the cowherds, he doesn't win every match — sometimes Sudama gets the better of him, and Krishna carries him home on his back anyway, laughing. That detail has stayed with me longer than most of the grander ones. A god who plays, who teases, who loses on purpose to a friend he loves — that's not a distant God. That's the whole promise of bhakti in a single small story, and I don't think it's a promise Christians always understand as well as they should.

You've built your whole spiritual life around that promise. Not an argument about the nature of ultimate reality, but a relationship — sakhya, if I'm using the word right, the love between friends who are equals enough to wrestle and lose to each other. And when the friendship deepens further, madhurya, the ache of a love that borders on longing. The gopis' songs to Krishna after he left Vrindavan for Mathura are some of the most beautiful devotional poetry I've ever read in any tradition, and I've read a fair amount.

The question I can't shake

Here's what I keep turning over, though, the longer I sit with those stories. Krishna's friendship with the cowherds, his flirtation with the gopis, even his fear and his grief in the great war — none of it, in the tradition's own account, ever actually cost him anything. His body wasn't ordinary flesh; even his death at the end of the Mahabharata, struck in the foot by a hunter's arrow, is understood as a return rather than a real ending. Nothing that was ever truly at risk was risked. The friendship was real, the tenderness was real — but the vulnerability wasn't, not all the way down.

Here's the question I can't set down: can a love that never risks anything be the same kind of love as one that does? A friend who could lose you and doesn't, versus a friend who genuinely could.

A friend who could lose everything, and did

📖 "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you." — John 15:13–15 (ESV)

Jesus said this to ordinary men the night before real soldiers came for him. Not a body that could set itself aside without loss — a body that could actually be nailed to wood and stop breathing. He called them friends anyway, on purpose, knowing exactly what the friendship was about to cost him and staying in it regardless. Sakhya, if you want the word for it, but sakhya that risked everything it claimed.

What I want for you

I don't think your love for Krishna has been wasted. I think it's aimed at something true — that God can be a friend, that longing itself is a form of devotion, that love is the real center of religion rather than an afterthought to doctrine. I just think the friend you've been loving was never asked to bleed for you the way you'd bleed for someone you truly loved. I know one who was, and stayed anyway.

Your friend, still learning what it costs to love someone the way you already do.

Primary Source Referenced: John 15:12–17

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.