5 May – Love One Another as I Have Loved You
Easter 6
5/5/2024
1 John 1:5-9
Psalm 98
John 15:9-17
Sermon preached by Daniel Broadstock
‘Love one another as I have loved you.’
Today in our lectionary reading, Jesus recalls, or perhaps better to say, foreshadows, last week’s reading from the first letter of John. In that letter, John says:
‘Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.’
This reading forms part of what is called Jesus’ Farewell Discourse. The final series of solemn words that Jesus imparts to his disciples as they gather together in apprehensive and furtive communion with Jesus for the last time. As they begin to face the cold new possibility of going on without Jesus. As they wrestle with the prospect of being left alone in a hostile world. I can only imagine how they must have drunk in these words, memorising them, meditating on them, arguing over their meaning, parsing over them again and again for crumbs of guidance and comfort in the days ahead.
We might think of this sequence as a kind of spoken Last Will and Testament. I think it is important to see it that way because it is generally at the end of our lives that we clarify, amongst all the tumult and distraction and day-to-day ordinariness, what is really important. We distil what our lives have meant and what we hope for the future. We seek the company of those we love. We express with a decisive finality who we are. What Jesus chooses to say now, we should regard as of supreme importance. It is a final summation of who he is and what he teaches. He reveals to the disciples what previously has been concealed, and he names them as his equals. No longer servants, but friends.
And this is his final summation:
God is love. Love one another as I have loved you.
How often have we heard these phrases? If you had to distil Christianity down to its barest elements, you could do worse than those. God is love. Love one another.
How good are you at loving, friends?
I wonder if familiarity dulls us to these words and their radicalness. How can we hear them today as though for the first time? How can we access their urgency, their insistence, their revolutionary character, as they must have been for the disciples who hear them firsthand?
One way, I think, is to remind ourselves of the context in which they are spoken.
We know that the world of the first century was a universe teeming with gods. It was an intensely polytheistic place. For the ordinary Roman, or the Greek, or the Egyptian, the gods were an inherent reality of what you did and what you experienced. It was expected that they would play a role, either in favour, curse, or indifference, the small affairs of your day-to-day living, and the great affairs of your kingdom. To the gods who presided over every aspect of life, you would appeal for the success of your business, for the safe passage of your ships, for the health of your household, for advantageous and harmonious marriage, for victory in war and stability in peace.
But what were the gods like?
The most influential of the ancient gods has always been the Greek. It is they who preceded the development of the Roman gods, and whose mythology has shaped divine stories throughout history and its many cultures.
The foremost of the Greek gods was Zeus. Presiding over the pantheon of Olympus, Zeus reigned, having overthrown the Titans and their primordial parents. Zeus was the god of sky and thunder, honoured above all, and deserving of sacrifice and worship befitting his station. But Zeus was also married to the goddess Hera, and was serially unfaithful to her. Zeus was a god driven by his lust. Again and again, he would see a mortal woman and desire her. He would couple with her, and his children became the demigods. But very often these couplings were violent and brutal. Sometimes he would disguise himself to get what he wanted. Sometimes he used force. Zeus was, in blunt terms, a serial rapist.
Perhaps you have heard of Prometheus, the god who, taking pity on humanity, gave them the gift of fire. And Zeus, furious at this unsanctioned act of initiative, punished Prometheus by chaining him to a mountain and condemning him that every day an eagle should come and peck out his liver.
Or Poseidon, the god of the sea. He too was as power-hungry and rapacious as his brother Zeus, and on one occasion forced himself upon a woman named Medusa, or was then transformed by Athena into a snake-haired monster.
These were the gods of the ancient world. They were not always so brutally callous. And the mythological stories are, in part, moral tales that serve an instructive, ethical purpose as well as a religious one.
But the gods of the Greek pantheon could never be accused of being characterised by ‘love’. Certainly not in the way that we understand it, and the way that Jesus or John means it. All the love of the ancient gods was directly inwardly. They loved themselves. They loved their pride and their vanity and their desire. They loved power and they loved to exercise it.
That’s why the historian Tom Holland in his excellent book ‘Dominion’ asserts so strongly the impact that the Christian gospel of love has exercised on the Western view of ourselves and our place in the world. What a transformation it must have been for those who had spent their lives making sacrifices to the capricious and self-loving gods of the old Pantheon, to think that God might love them. Not just favour them, but to enfold Godself, by God’s very nature, into loving relationship with them through God’s given son.
It changed the world.
And it must continue to change the world, through us.
The most important thing to say about this love that changes the world, is that it is not a feeling. It is not a chemical reaction that occurs in the brain and is exhausted. Not sentimentality. Not a temporary feeling of passion or nostalgia. It is not affection. Affection and passion may accompany love, but love in this theological sense encompasses so much more than the heart that beats harder.
Love is the greatest of all the gifts of the spirit. Love is our law. It is our constitution. It is our judge and our government. It is our yardstick and our scale. It speaks in our heart in no uncertain terms, to tell us what it requires. Love longs for reconciliation and forgiveness. It insists on mercy. It is patient and it is kind. Love is not proud, but it will fight for what is right. It is not jealous, but will make sacrifices for justice. Love is revealed in Jesus, God incarnate, who shares our life in the world. It is in love that the world is made, and toward love that all things bend.
Love is relationship. It is the obligation of being created things. We love because God first loved us. So it cannot rise and fall with our mood or our sentiment. It is for that reason that it is possible to love strangers, or our enemy. It makes it possible, above all, to die for what is right, as Jesus does.
It is for the law of love that we must be known for our staunch opposition to violence against women. It is for the law of love that we must be known as enemies of violence against children. It is for the law of love that we must be squarely against colonisation and unjust war and capricious injustice. We haven’t always been good at that, but we must become better. That is how we redeem the Gospel in the eyes of the world. The law of love places us in opposition to all those things that the old gods were. It places us in opposition to all the things that the gods of our day represent. The god of money, the god of power, the god of sex, the god of profit, the god of consumption, the god of novelty. The god of self-love is like a still pond, stagnant and unclean, and rotten. Nothing grows there. But the love of relationship, love that is given and received, is a river. It has movement, it gives life. It is clear and clean. You can drink from that water.
There is no fault in the law of love. It can never lose its power. It can never lose its revolutionary character. Only we, who can fail to live up to it. We don’t need a new story. The old story is still strong. It is ever young. We just have to keep telling it, keep holding on to it, keep making it real in our lives, and it will vindicate us. It cannot fail to vindicate us. The law of love will live on after us. No institutional failing of our making can diminish it. We can only diminish ourselves as its representatives and its disciples. But through it, we may abide in the great love of Jesus Christ. That for which there is no better thing to live for.
May the spirit strengthen and renew us as we seek to live out this final will and testament of Jesus Christ the lover:
Love one another as I have loved you.
Amen