Love is All You Need

5-6-18 (Easter 6B)

1 John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17

Love is All You Need

It was a bit of a struggle this week to center in on what to write for this sermon.  This is the third week in a row in which the texts have had so much of the same things to say as John continues to exercise his rhetorical prowess and talk in this complex, repetitive, almost circular style.  We hear John reiterating this central theme again and again and again - if he had written this letter on a laptop, it would be completely in caps lock and in 24 point font by this point.  Abide, abide, abide.  Love, Love, Love.

It brought to mind the Beatles for me for a moment - Love, love, love…. love, love, love… Jesus’ central commandment, the one, singular, defining theme of his ministry and work as laid out by John, is the love of God.  Where Matthew, Mark, and Luke have Jesus giving two commandments: love God, love your neighbor, for John, it seems that love truly is all that you need.  Jesus gives one great commandment in John: love one another as I have loved you.  And in this singular commandment, John argues that everything else simply follows naturally.  If you love one another in the same way that I have loved you, then you will abide in Christ’s love just as Christ abides in his Father’s love by following the Father’s commandments - which, it would seem, are much the same: to go into the world and love it.

Jesus takes this idea of love as the guiding principle of faithfulness and then continues to build on it - his commandment to love is not just the centerpoint of his final teachings; it’s the determining factor that Jesus lifts up as the pivotal quality that takes his disciples from being his servants to being his friends.  While the phrasing here is odd, it’s nevertheless an incredible moment that is all to easy to gloss over in our rush to get to the more familiar verses of this section.  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 can you imagine being around the table at that moment?  This man whom you have called teacher and master… and now he calls you friends… there’s a weight to that statement, a moment of incredible importance.  And yet at the same time, it’s marked by this odd pairing of friendship with obedience and we’re perhaps left a little confused, a little unsure of what to make of the whole matter.  I think this is why it’s so important that Jesus has already prefaced this profound moment with his own demonstration of what his friendship, what the deepest extent of the love that he is commanding looks like.

Jesus tells the disciples, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”  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.”  He simply supports his statements here as he 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.

We hear this phrase time and time again, most often quoted in the more flowery language of the King James Version: “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”  And we’ve almost romanticized it at this point - if you do an image search for this verse online, the results may strike you as a bit surprising: the majority of images that first come up are not of Jesus on the cross, or of simple graphical representations of the text: they’re primarily images of soldiers and patriotic American flag backgrounds.  We hear this verse quoted quite frequently during Memorial Day services as we honor those men and women who have laid down their lives, not just for friends, but for people whom they’d never know.  And it is even appropriate for us to recognize that sacrifice, to acknowledge that the acts of service that our soldiers and first responders render are a kind of living embodiment of this teaching.  But at the same time, we need to exercise discernment and grace in not allowing this verse to take on only a military theme in our reading - we do well even to not restrict Jesus’ teachings here as being solely about being willing to die for another person.  When Jesus talks of laying down one’s life, he is absolutely pointing toward his own journey to the cross, but I believe he’s also getting at something more than just the sacrifice of one life for another.  While his own actions show the fullest extent of self-sacrificing love, and people like soldiers, police, firefighters and EMT’s do often set aside their own personal safety and lives in order to give life to others, I believe this same, self-sacrificial love can also be found in what we might otherwise consider mundane: the teacher who pours money out of their own pockets every year to make sure their students have the supplies they need when our schools continue to lose funding; the nurse who works back to back 48 hour shifts, not getting to see their children as often as they’d like because they’re setting broken bones and administering medications; the road-worker who gets called in at three in the morning because, despite the weather being warm the last few days, it’s decided to snow again and the roads need to be kept safe; the farmer who stays out late into the night because a cow is taking just that much longer to give birth to her calf; the parent who wakes up with the sick child, gathers up the soiled pajamas and bedsheets, and helps them get back to sleep; the community that rallies together and expresses their support for their neighbor by collecting money to help pay off a hospital bill or to provide food, clothing, and shelter for a family struck by tragedy…

Jesus tells us that all these things and more are true reflections of God’s love surrounding us in this world - not just the heroic, but also the everyday moments in which we set aside our own needs to care for one another.  And he tells us that, in doing these things, and in continuing to challenge ourselves to seek out the ways in which God is continuing to call us to show love to even more people, and especially to those to whom the world shows the least love… we show not only that we are obedient to God’s calling on our lives, but also that we are truly companions with Christ as we continue his ministry on earth.

Friends, let us continue to love - let us continue to seek out the ways in which God is calling us to lay our own lives aside, both in the ordinary and the extraordinary.  May we continue to abide in love, to abide in Christ, and to love one another as Christ has loved us.  For, indeed, Love is all we need.  To God be the Glory.  Amen.