Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
This week we hear, “This is
my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (Jn.
15:12). Last week, we heard, "Abide
in me…. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me
and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing” (Jn.
15:5). The invitation and the command are connected, but how? How can love be a
command and remain love? Can love be forced? How is it possible to love as
Jesus loved? Aren’t we just setting ourselves up for failure and
disappointment? These are good questions to consider as we prepare our
hearts for Communion, and break bread at the Lord’s Table.
So, what is this fruit that we are called to bear? There’s no ambiguity here. He’s very clear about this. The fruit is love. Our capacity to love marks us as followers of
the Lord of Love. Our capacity to offer
love and receive love is the one sure sign that we belong to him. And when we live this way, we honor and
glorify God. Jesus said, “My Father is
glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples. As the
Father has loved me, so I have loved you: abide in my love” (Jn. 15:8). Glorified—it’s
such a church word, isn’t it? Glorify
means to exalt, to worship, to honor. It
also has something to do with revelation; in other words, something about God
is revealed, that is, disclosed to us when God is glorified. Something of God shines through. And God is glorified when we abide in and
remain in and stay connected to God’s love, just as Jesus abided in and
remained connected to God’s love throughout his life. When we’re abiding
in love we’re able to bear fruit and the fruit is always love. The
world knows we are followers of the Risen Christ when we love—that’s the fruit
that matters.
This week, we continue reading through John 15,
and discover that Jesus’ invitation to abide is linked with a command that we
love one another. “This is my commandment,
that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than
this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (Jn. 15:12-13). Remarkably, Jesus doesn’t see us as his
servant or slave; we are called friend.
This is the only place where Jesus identifies his followers as his
friends. And the designation friend should not to be taken
lightly. We often use the word loosely,
ranging from an acquaintance to a very special, valued relationship, a “best
friend.” Having friends on Facebook has redefined what we mean by friend. To be considered a friend in Jesus’ time was
an honor, it was an expression of love.
The Greek word for “friend,” philos,
comes from one of the verbs for love (phileo). Because Jesus loves us,
he calls us friend; as friends, in love, he shares with us all that he learned
and discovered from God.
“You are my friends,” he says, “if you do what I command you” (Jn.
1:14). “You did not choose me but I
chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will
last” (Jn. 15:16). The invitation to
friendship is now linked with a command, which brings us back to our earlier
questions. How can
love be a command and remain love? Can love be forced? If love is forced
and therefore not flowing from an authentic feeling or choice, is it still
love? Should we just fake it? Should we fake it until we believe it? And how is it even possible to love as Jesus
loved? This is a tall order. Aren’t we
just setting ourselves up for failure and disappointment?
On the surface, this text can be extremely
unsettling. If we go deeper, this text will yield considerable joy.
First, we have to consider how we’re hearing the command to love and the
image of the one who is saying it to us.
If you carry the assumption that faith, religion, the Christian life is
essentially about obeying the commands of Jesus who represents God the Lawgiver,
who pronounces judgment upon everyone who doesn’t uphold God’s Law, then this
command is a heavy burden indeed. But if
you consider Jesus, who said in John’s Gospel, “I am the good shepherd”—or,
better—“I am the beautiful shepherd” (Jn. 10:11), if this is your image of Jesus, and
therefore, God, then the command is coming from someone who cares about us, who
wants what is best for us, whose way of being yields beauty. Jesus’ command to love comes from one who is
love, which means it’s given in love, given for our own good.
The second thing we need to consider is that Jesus is not lifting up himself as a role model. This might sound shocking, but it’s
true. Jesus is often portrayed this
way, I know. He’s often lifted up as the
model of perfection, sinless, who demonstrated a way of life that we should all
be striving for, as someone we should emulate, copy, imitate. This view is represented by the medieval
Catholic author Thomas À Kempis (1380-1471), who wrote the devotional classic The Imitation of Christ. Many, both Christian and non-Christian alike,
think that this sums up what is means to be Christian: be like Jesus. Later, during the nineteenth century, many
theologians, pastors, and congregations viewed Jesus as essentially a teacher
of morality, a teacher of ethics.
Because so many theologians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
jettisoned from Jesus, and the Bible, anything that smacked of the supernatural
(including his divinity, the possibility of miracles or resurrection), all that
was left was Jesus as moral exemplar. Jesus was someone to look up to, emulate,
copy. He was a role model. This was classic liberal theology of the
nineteenth century in the United States and Europe, a view which exploded in
the trenches of the First World War.
Love, if it is love, cannot
be an ethical duty; neither can it be attained through the efforts of the human
spirit. Here
in John, yes, Jesus wants us to love.
But Jesus also knows that we cannot begin to bear fruit unless we are
connected to him, the vine, to the Source of love. That’s why he wants us to
abide in him, stay connected to him, rest in him. This is why Jesus is more than a role
model; he is this, of course, but so much more. He is friend, true friend, who
shares with us the depths of this love, who, in the sharing gives us the
capacity to love, to bear fruit. It is inherently relational. What we find here
is not a call to imitation, but an invitation to participation. Jesus invites us to share in the life of
God! Jesus said, “Those who abide in me
and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing” (Jn.
15:5). The
human capacity to give and receive love is given by participating in a loving
relationship with God who is love (1 John 4:7). The command to love would
be oppressive if it were not for the fact that God gives the human spirit, gives
us, the ability to love in the intimacy of the Spirit.[1] And Jesus wants us to know
all of this so that his joy may be in us, and that our joy may be complete,
full, to overflowing.
When we abide in him, we’re given the capacity to love as God loves. Then
we’re given the capacity to see the world as God sees it, to see ourselves and
our neighbor and the stranger, and maybe even the person we might hate and find
difficult to forgive or accept or love. Several years ago, I was
introduced to the poetry of Kathleen Raine (1908-2003). A child of the
manse in Scotland, she lived most of her life in Northumbria, England. She was known
for her scholarship on William Blake (1757-1827). She said, “Unless you
see a thing in the light of love, you do not see a thing at all.”[2] Love, itself, flowing from the source of
love, allows us to see, it transfigures everything.
“Jesus’s commandment to us is not that we wear
ourselves out, trying to conjure love from our own easily depleted
resources. Rather, it’s that we abide in the holy place where human love
becomes possible. That we make our home in Jesus’s love — the most
abundant and inexhaustible love in existence.”[3]
And so, in love, he gives us this meal. Communion.
We’re invited to the Table—this holy place—not once, but again and again
and again. To feed on him, to drink from
the source. Abiding in his love. Bearing the fruit of his love in our lives.
Full of his joy.
Art: John August Swanson
[1] Kenneth E. Kovacs, The Relational
Theology of James E. Loder: Encounter and Conviction (New York: Peter Lang, 2011).
[2] Cited in John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom (HarperCollins, 1989), 65.
[3] Debie Blue,
“As I Have Loved You,” Journey with Jesus.
