John 15:9-17
“Love, Over and Over Again”
May 9, 2021
Most of us want to break free.
We’ve had enough of restrictions – mask requirements, social distancing, limits on numbers of people indoors, large gatherings shrunk down and spaced out, church and meetings relegated to screens and phone lines, hand sanitizer use expected, and temperature checks automatically done upon entry, sporting events and concerts offered without audiences, not being able to visit those we care about in senior living communities and hospitals.
So many aspects of our lives have been controlled by an invisible and potentially deadly virus for these past 14 months and we are chomping at the bit. Being here today, with masks optional and singing and praying aloud is our first step as a community of faith toward reclaiming a bit of what we’ve been missing.
Those of us who were just young children or born after World War II have never known what it’s like to have key aspects of our lives and movements and interactions dictated by the powers that be.
Most of us as adults squirm or even outright rebel against anyone telling us what to do even though we have countless numbers of laws locally, by state and nationally that we adhere to.
In any workplace that has employed us there were rules and expectations.
Way back as five-year-olds, we would have learned early on in school what was expected of us when it came to when we could talk, how to play nice and how to stay safe.
And, of course, I need not remind any of you veterans that the military is nothing if not bound by mountains of rules and regulations. But let’s shift for just a moment to love.
Maybe you can relate to the religion writer who each Sunday on the drive home from church would ask her young children what they had learned from that week’s worship service.
Often, she would hear about the hymn they really liked or when they heard the older man at the other end of the pew snoring.
When she pressed them further and asked what the sermon was about, they always answered the same way every week – “Love.”
She was never sure if they were telling her the answer she wanted to hear or because that was the single most important lesson of the Gospels and not just a lesson for children but a mandate for every follower of Jesus.
Jesus here, in what is known as his “farewell discourse” or parting words, issues his ultimate commandment: “Love one another as I have loved you.” How do you order people to love people?
Especially when you know you are about to leave them, and they are having a hard time with that concept.
The order to love as they have been loved is the basis for joy.
Jesus is not abandoning his friends. Rather he is telling them that the way he will always be with them is through friendship that is more than someone to spend a night on the town with or even share secrets with. Jesus is talking about a friend who would lay their own life for just such a friend.
The Irish writer John O’Donohue wrote beautifully on the whole idea of anam cara or soul friend. At one time this meant a friend you trusted with your inner most thoughts and feelings. It is now expanded to be a relationship with an intentionality about it. It is about understanding and being understood and being an active presence. It is the kind of friend who brings out the best in you. O’Donohue took a concept from Aristotle and stretched it when he described an anam cara as “A friend is a loved one who awakens your life in order to free the wild possibilities within you…
your anam cara, your soul friend, is the truest mirror to reflect your soul.” It takes imagination to love as Jesus loves.
What Jesus is doing here is trying to draw us into a love with God that was radical and new for his time.
Relationships in that era were between unequal parties.
Almost every relationship back then was between the dominant one, the patron and the subordinate one, the client.
Viewing the other as a true equal was a radical concept.
Seeing the other as not someone with more or less value but rather as equally valued in God’s sight was part of that crazy new perspective and message that got Jesus in trouble with the authorities.
At the time, power was based on someone being entitled to more because of title, family tree, money and where they were from.
It was to one’s advantage to have more information that led to more access and ultimately more power.
Entitlement carried secrecy with it in the Mediterranean part of the world that Jesus was born into.
And, so, the Jesus who became a friend to his disciples, who opened up and clued them in on all that he knew about God – this was new and amazing stuff.
To learn and have reinforced the notion that joy was to be the birthright not of some but of all, must have been almost too much for his disciples to believe.
Then to be the bearers of such joy through love that had to have seemed beyond anything they could do and yet, that was what their friend Jesus kept telling them.
Jesus hand-delivers the message that hatred and persecution will not have the final word, that in the end it is love that has the power to change and endure.
Will we be brave enough to live into this commandment?
Not like the laws and rules and regulations that are so much of the structure that keeps our society somewhat safe and secure and predictable.
No, what Jesus is calling us to is a love so powerful that it will bear fruit – the fruit of more love and justice and peace.
Will we risk such an amazing love, in the name of Jesus?
Let us pray then these words from the Rev. Chelsea Waite from Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta:
“God of unconditional love and grace, we thank you for your Word that reminds us of our call to action – our call to love. May the commandment of Christ to love be our lifestyle. May we who embrace your Word be reminded to bear the fruit of love and justice for our neighbor. Amen.”