Greater Love
5-10-15 (Easter 6B)
1 John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17
Jesus’ words in this passage are among the more compelling teachings that we hear in the Gospels: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” - we especially hear them around Memorial Day as we remember those men and women who laid down their lives, not just for friends, but for people whom they’d never know. But as noble as those words are, and even as appropriate as they can be to remember our fallen, Jesus tells his disciples this in something of a different context, and for a different purpose as he continues in this “final discourse” from John’s Gospel.
Perhaps the strangest thing about it all isn’t even the fact that Jesus talks about laying down his life for his friends; it’s the fact that Jesus calls the disciples his friends in the first place. Throughout other parts of the Gospel, Jesus addresses the disciples as being like servants - he tells them that they must become like the “least of these,” and even as he washes the disciples’ feet, he tells them that the servant is not greater than the master. But as Jesus addresses his disciples on the night that he is betrayed, just a short time before he is killed, he tells them “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.”
Jesus calls his disciples his friends - he tells them that he has chosen them to be his friends, that he is appointing them to go out and to bear fruit, and that he is going to lay down his life for them out of that love. And yet in the midst of all of this, Jesus also tells them that his friendship is also marked by their obedience. It’s something I’d never noticed before in this passage, and really, it’s somewhat odd… Jesus tells the disciples “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” And suddenly, this entire discourse is thrown upside down to me: what kind of friend expects obedience? Why does Jesus tell the disciples that he no longer calls them servants, but friends, and then simultaneously expect obedience from them? How many times do you turn to those closest friends of yours, the ones whom you would do anything for, even risking your own life to save theirs, and order them to do something, or else you won’t be their friend? Doesn’t that seem a little bit like the young children on the playground instead of the Lord and Savior of all humanity?
We have to ask: Is it just a failure in translation, a lack of accurate words in English to cover the concepts John uses in the Greek? The text is, unfortunately, very clear in its language here. So, then, what are we supposed to do with something so strange coming out of Jesus’ mouth, especially in the midst of such otherwise encouraging and powerful words?
I think the solution can only be found in a greater context - both in the context of Jesus’ final discourse with the disciples and in the letter of 1 John, which comes almost as a commentary on John’s gospel, itself. Once again, just as we’ve heard repeated over and over in the readings for the last several weeks, love and the imperative to abide in that love are once again at the center of Jesus’ instruction and even his commandments. Jesus isn’t applying some kind of condition to his love or friendship to the disciples - he’s already given them the central commandment of his discourse! “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” Then he simply tells them - if you follow this commandment, then you are acting not just as servants anymore, but truly as my friends - and there is no greater love than laying down your life for your friends, which is exactly what Jesus is about to do.
Once again, Jesus is setting the imperative that the disciples be centered always in love. John writes in his letter that we know we are children of God by the way we show our love - when we love God and obey God’s commandments, which John also writes are not burdensome. From Jesus’ words, we know that the commandment is simple: Love one another as Christ has loved us. Love one another enough to lay down your lives for each other, to see each person as a beloved child of God and, yes, even a friend who is worthy of your care, your attention, your compassion and love.
It sounds so easy, the way John puts it… being a follower, a friend of Christ is as simple as loving one another. It doesn’t seem like something that should be so hard for us to understand and to apply, and yet Jesus in John’s gospel keeps repeating it, repeating it, and repeating it to the disciples during this farewell discourse. John repeats it again, even several times again, in his letters - love. Love. Love. To be honest, as I worked on my sermon this week, I’ve started to run out of ways to keep exploring this same theme week after week after week. And yet it demands to be explored, it’s so important. Jesus spends so much time on this topic, stating and re-stating the same thing in as many ways as he can, because it’s the most important of all his teachings: without understanding what it means to love another person as Christ loves each and every one of us, we can’t understand who Christ is. Love is at the very center of Christ’s identity, and as such, it also needs to be at the center of our identity in Christ.
To love someone - it seems like such a simple thing. To be their friend, to reach out to them in both times of need and times of plenty, to walk alongside them, to be willing to give up some of your own comforts to help your friend succeed - they’re things that we understand, that we see in our own relationships with our closest friends. And yet Jesus’ commandment and his expectation that we obey in love goes beyond just those we consider friends already - we are expected to be friends to all. We’re expected to lay down our lives, not just for our children, not just for our mothers, our fathers, our spouses and significant others, not just to our closest friends, but to all people. We’re called to love and lay down our lives for the family next door with the mess in the front yard, for the immigrants at the edge of town waiting for work, for the police officers standing at the protest lines, for the men and women who express their anger and distrust through looting and destruction, and perhaps even especially for the ones who are our enemies, who seek to do us the most harm, who hate us, despise us, or even seek to kill us.
And it’s this that makes Jesus’ commandment so hard to understand and follow - it’s the very reason that Jesus drills the importance of love into the disciples during this final discourse. How can we genuinely love people who hate us and want to hurt us? How could someone even think of willingly laying down their lives for a child abuser or an ISIS gunman? How is that a commandment like that is not burdensome?
Though it may be an attitude that we only see perfectly exhibited in the Kingdom of Christ, we can still strive toward adopting that sense of love in all that we do and are in this present world. Rev. Fred Rogers, perhaps the closest thing to a saint we may ever come to recognizing in the Presbyterian Church, once said, “All the major religions espouse peace and love. If everyone made manifest what he or she professes the world would be such a profoundly different place.” For Mr. Rogers, the way of manifesting the love that we profess was so much more than being willing to take a bullet - laying down your life for another meant being a helper, a person dedicated toward helping bring about the Kingdom of Peace that Christ promises by being people of peace, by being people of love. In his book, Mr. Rogers Talks With Parents, he writes:
And perhaps there’s something to that - something that St. Rogers hits on that we can, ourselves, grasp onto and lift up as our greatest hope of living out the Great Commandment. Perhaps, what laying down our lives for others really means, above all else, is being willing to be helpers to them. It means laying aside our own judgments, our own hatred and our own prejudices, and reaching out a hand to help lift one another up in the love of Jesus Christ. And as we look, ourselves, for the helpers in this world, let us above all remember to strive always to be those helpers, as well. To God be the Glory. Amen.
1 John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17
Greater Love
Jesus’ words in this passage are among the more compelling teachings that we hear in the Gospels: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” - we especially hear them around Memorial Day as we remember those men and women who laid down their lives, not just for friends, but for people whom they’d never know. But as noble as those words are, and even as appropriate as they can be to remember our fallen, Jesus tells his disciples this in something of a different context, and for a different purpose as he continues in this “final discourse” from John’s Gospel.
Perhaps the strangest thing about it all isn’t even the fact that Jesus talks about laying down his life for his friends; it’s the fact that Jesus calls the disciples his friends in the first place. Throughout other parts of the Gospel, Jesus addresses the disciples as being like servants - he tells them that they must become like the “least of these,” and even as he washes the disciples’ feet, he tells them that the servant is not greater than the master. But as Jesus addresses his disciples on the night that he is betrayed, just a short time before he is killed, he tells them “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.”
Jesus calls his disciples his friends - he tells them that he has chosen them to be his friends, that he is appointing them to go out and to bear fruit, and that he is going to lay down his life for them out of that love. And yet in the midst of all of this, Jesus also tells them that his friendship is also marked by their obedience. It’s something I’d never noticed before in this passage, and really, it’s somewhat odd… Jesus tells the disciples “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” And suddenly, this entire discourse is thrown upside down to me: what kind of friend expects obedience? Why does Jesus tell the disciples that he no longer calls them servants, but friends, and then simultaneously expect obedience from them? How many times do you turn to those closest friends of yours, the ones whom you would do anything for, even risking your own life to save theirs, and order them to do something, or else you won’t be their friend? Doesn’t that seem a little bit like the young children on the playground instead of the Lord and Savior of all humanity?
We have to ask: Is it just a failure in translation, a lack of accurate words in English to cover the concepts John uses in the Greek? The text is, unfortunately, very clear in its language here. So, then, what are we supposed to do with something so strange coming out of Jesus’ mouth, especially in the midst of such otherwise encouraging and powerful words?
I think the solution can only be found in a greater context - both in the context of Jesus’ final discourse with the disciples and in the letter of 1 John, which comes almost as a commentary on John’s gospel, itself. Once again, just as we’ve heard repeated over and over in the readings for the last several weeks, love and the imperative to abide in that love are once again at the center of Jesus’ instruction and even his commandments. Jesus isn’t applying some kind of condition to his love or friendship to the disciples - he’s already given them the central commandment of his discourse! “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” Then he simply tells them - if you follow this commandment, then you are acting not just as servants anymore, but truly as my friends - and there is no greater love than laying down your life for your friends, which is exactly what Jesus is about to do.
Once again, Jesus is setting the imperative that the disciples be centered always in love. John writes in his letter that we know we are children of God by the way we show our love - when we love God and obey God’s commandments, which John also writes are not burdensome. From Jesus’ words, we know that the commandment is simple: Love one another as Christ has loved us. Love one another enough to lay down your lives for each other, to see each person as a beloved child of God and, yes, even a friend who is worthy of your care, your attention, your compassion and love.
It sounds so easy, the way John puts it… being a follower, a friend of Christ is as simple as loving one another. It doesn’t seem like something that should be so hard for us to understand and to apply, and yet Jesus in John’s gospel keeps repeating it, repeating it, and repeating it to the disciples during this farewell discourse. John repeats it again, even several times again, in his letters - love. Love. Love. To be honest, as I worked on my sermon this week, I’ve started to run out of ways to keep exploring this same theme week after week after week. And yet it demands to be explored, it’s so important. Jesus spends so much time on this topic, stating and re-stating the same thing in as many ways as he can, because it’s the most important of all his teachings: without understanding what it means to love another person as Christ loves each and every one of us, we can’t understand who Christ is. Love is at the very center of Christ’s identity, and as such, it also needs to be at the center of our identity in Christ.
To love someone - it seems like such a simple thing. To be their friend, to reach out to them in both times of need and times of plenty, to walk alongside them, to be willing to give up some of your own comforts to help your friend succeed - they’re things that we understand, that we see in our own relationships with our closest friends. And yet Jesus’ commandment and his expectation that we obey in love goes beyond just those we consider friends already - we are expected to be friends to all. We’re expected to lay down our lives, not just for our children, not just for our mothers, our fathers, our spouses and significant others, not just to our closest friends, but to all people. We’re called to love and lay down our lives for the family next door with the mess in the front yard, for the immigrants at the edge of town waiting for work, for the police officers standing at the protest lines, for the men and women who express their anger and distrust through looting and destruction, and perhaps even especially for the ones who are our enemies, who seek to do us the most harm, who hate us, despise us, or even seek to kill us.
And it’s this that makes Jesus’ commandment so hard to understand and follow - it’s the very reason that Jesus drills the importance of love into the disciples during this final discourse. How can we genuinely love people who hate us and want to hurt us? How could someone even think of willingly laying down their lives for a child abuser or an ISIS gunman? How is that a commandment like that is not burdensome?
Though it may be an attitude that we only see perfectly exhibited in the Kingdom of Christ, we can still strive toward adopting that sense of love in all that we do and are in this present world. Rev. Fred Rogers, perhaps the closest thing to a saint we may ever come to recognizing in the Presbyterian Church, once said, “All the major religions espouse peace and love. If everyone made manifest what he or she professes the world would be such a profoundly different place.” For Mr. Rogers, the way of manifesting the love that we profess was so much more than being willing to take a bullet - laying down your life for another meant being a helper, a person dedicated toward helping bring about the Kingdom of Peace that Christ promises by being people of peace, by being people of love. In his book, Mr. Rogers Talks With Parents, he writes:
“Much of what is seen through the mass media is . . . dramatized mayhem, murder, debased sexuality, and an endless succession of real-life disaster, tragedy, and violence that comes to us through news and documentaries. When I was a child and my mother and I would read about such events in the newspapers or see them in newsreels, she used to tell me, ‘Always look for the helpers. There’s always someone who is trying to help.’ I did, and doing so changed the way I saw them. I began to see the world was full of doctors and nurses, volunteers, neighbors, and friends who jumped in to help when things went wrong.”
And perhaps there’s something to that - something that St. Rogers hits on that we can, ourselves, grasp onto and lift up as our greatest hope of living out the Great Commandment. Perhaps, what laying down our lives for others really means, above all else, is being willing to be helpers to them. It means laying aside our own judgments, our own hatred and our own prejudices, and reaching out a hand to help lift one another up in the love of Jesus Christ. And as we look, ourselves, for the helpers in this world, let us above all remember to strive always to be those helpers, as well. To God be the Glory. Amen.
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