Texts: Acts 10.44-48; 1 John 5.1-6; John 15.9-17
This morning I want to lead you in
a criminally brief meditation about love. ‘Love’ is
a word that has almost come to grief in our modern world. Used so often, and with so many different
interests and agendas, it is in danger of becoming empty: no more than a
vacuous vessel into which both speaker and spoken-to may pour any kind of
meaning they like.
Depending on the context, love
turns out to mean so many things. In Hollywood, love is a
feeling of euphoria, a chemistry between people which (like the weather) can
come and go. While that euphoria is
around, life is great. But when it
departs, there is no longer any reason to persevere with a relationship. In
some sections of the Australian military, love seems to mean being willing to
stick by your mates even if your mates are using and abusing you. Love means keeping silence while your ‘mates’
do with you as they will. It means remaining loyal to people who actually hate
you. In the middle-class suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, love so often means
no more than ‘being nice’, that is, keeping up the appearance that we all get
on with each other (even though we don’t) or pretending that we have a common
view of the world (when actually we don’t).
Love, in this context, means to avoid talking about anything that may
raise our passions, for fear that the other person’s passions may come back at
us in unpleasant ways. This is ‘love’ as
the avoidance of difference, or conflict, or strong emotions, or the
possibility of working toward a common truth.
Love is being polite, even to the point of living a lie. I suspect this
is the creed of many of our churches as well.
John the Evangelist has Jesus say
this, and I quote:
As the Father has loved me, so I
have loved you; abide in my love. If you
keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my
Father’s commandments and abide in his love . . . 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. You are my
friends if you do what I command you. I
do not call you slaves any longer, because the slave does not know what the
master is doing. Instead, I have called
you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have learned
from my Father.
I want to make just three
observations about this extraordinary passage.
First, that the love of which Christ speaks does not wait for human thinking
or culture to fill it with meaning. No,
the meaning of this love is always already established: it is an imitation of Christ’s radical form
of friendship, the willingness to lay aside one’s own life in order that another’s
life may flourish. It is, in the
words of Paul Ricoeur, the apprehension that the other person has a claim on me, and that I am no longer
responsible only for myself, but that I share in the responsibility to ensure
that the life of my brother or sister is able to flourish as well, to become
what God intends that it may become.
A second point now. The language of laying down one’s life
refers, of course, to a particular history:
the real event of Christ’s crucifixion.
It should be remembered, however, that the crucifixion represents not
just the love of a singular man at a particular time, for a particular
community. The crucifixion is a sign in
the world of the love of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit
for every single creature, in every
time and place. The cross enacts in
human history what God is like, and will always be like, for eternity: sheer love. We are talking here about the love of the Father for the Son, and the Son for the Father; the love
that is able to welcome and cede its place to the other; the love
that is willing to lose that another may win; the love that able to long for
another’s flourishing and give that longing both form and body. All that Christ did in the world, he learned
from his Father. Now the Father and the
Son have come to us anew in the Spirit, that the love which properly belongs to
the Father and the Son may be spread abroad in our own, oh-so-human cultures,
relationships and bodies.
A final observation. The love of God, as I have been saying, is
not without substance. It has form and
shape and a particular history in the world, and that is really what the
language of ‘commandment’ is about, in this passage. We are commanded to love not because God is a
bully and we are his slaves. On the
contrary, as Jesus says here, we are no longer slaves but friends; but this is
only the case insofar as we are willing to love. The command to love, you see, is also (and
somewhat paradoxically) the means by which God frees us from our bondage to
self. If we did not love, we would still
be slaves to all that we are apart from Christ—a series of basic, and
seemingly irresistible, drives-toward-power derived from DNA, from family, from
our peer environment, or where ever. In
love, however, we learn to listen for another voice, the voice of God, who
alone knows how it is that human beings may flourish. The command to love is therefore, in its most
basic form, an apprehension of the pressure God exerts towards our freedom, our
liberation towards a life lived not only for ourselves, but for the people
around us as well. The command to love
reminds us that love cannot be what we want it to be. Love can only be what God is.
So then, let us love one
another. Not after the manner of fashion
or convenience, but after the costly manner of God in Christ. Let us love one another as if we had a claim
on each other. Let us love as though
nothing else really mattered. And
whatever we do, let us not turn love into that kind of law that is unable to
forgive and set free. For the love of
God is the capacity to forgive most of all.
Let us therefore love and forgive each other from the heart, just as in
Christ God has loved and forgiven us.
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