"As I have loved you"-Sermon for Easter 5, John 13:31-35
So, as I sat down to prepare today’s sermon, the first question that came to my mind was why the authors of our lectionary, which assigns our scripture readings for each Sunday of the year, why they have brought us back to the Last Supper…back to the night before Jesus’ crucifixion. I mean this is the 5th Sunday of Easter after all. We are very much in the middle of the Great 50 Days of the Easter Season. I mean my Easter decorations are still up…were covered up in eggs and bunnies at home! Yet, on this 5###sup/sup### Sunday of Easter, rather than hearing another story of Jesus appearing to his disciples after his resurrection or the like, our Gospel reading today from John lands us back in the very shadow of the cross. Just to help set our reading in its context, we are, again, at the Last Supper on the night before Jesus is crucified. He has just concluded this final meal with his friends and followers, a meal that in John’s telling included Jesus washing his disciples’ feet, and then following the meal Jesus continues with an extended time of teaching that biblical scholars call Jesus’ “farewell discourse”…that is his final words of wisdom and blessing shared with his loved ones before making his way to the Garden of Gethsemane…where he would be betrayed by a kiss, then arrested, judged, beaten and crucified. So, again, what might this, if you will, step back in the story be all about?
Well, I think the answer is…or at least my answer is…that to properly understand Jesus’ “farewell discourse”…or at least the part in which he says specifically, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another” …to fully fathom and appreciate this new commandment…that sits at the very center of what it means to follow Jesus…only makes sense…and can only make sense…by looking back on those words…from this side of Easter. For, only after we experience what follows this teaching, Jesus’ death on the hard wood of the cross and his glorious resurrection at Easter, can we begin to truly internalize, comprehend and hopefully live out what this new commandment means…to love one another…just as Jesus loves us.
You see, love is so often a word that gets lost in sentimentality. I am entirely guilty of it. If anything, I am a big, soft romantic at heart. I’m all in on Hallmark at Christmas. I weep just a little in every movie. I sometimes subject friends to reading my poetry out loud over candlelight and red wine. I frolic occasionally. We often first think of love as a feeling…like a Shakespearian sonnet, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day. Thou art more lovely and more temperate.” And, there is real power in such sentimentality…a gentleness, openheartedness, and desire to see beauty in everything…that’s good for the soul and well-being of the world…and I’m all for it. But…but, I think the love that Jesus calls his followers, including each of us, to inhabit with every fiber of our being in this new commandment…might look more like a cross than a budding flower or new-found infatuation, as lovely and fun as both are. For I believe love, in all of its eternal wonder, finds its expression most completely in the pouring out of oneself for the benefit of another.
Thus, to help us understand what he means when he commands us to love one another just like he loves us, Jesus follows this commandment by demonstrating exactly what such love looks like…what it is…and how we will know it. And, he does so by giving himself over to the cross that we might be saved from the power of sin and death…that love alone might be our end…from forever to forever. On the cross, Jesus shows us exactly what love looks like…which is a willingness to lose it all. Love, in our death dealing world, often includes blood, sweat and tears. Love always risks suffering and always requires courage. Love is both soft and hard. It is a tender heart full of compassion and concern for the other…a heart so passionately in love with another…that it can only give of itself entirely…until it beats no longer…just like the moment when Jesus’ heart gave out on the hard wood of the cross.
And, when I think about what that kind of love looks like, a Jesus shaped love, in our own ordinary and extraordinary lives, I think of things like the babe at its mother’s breast. Pouring out her own love, physical and spiritual, to the benefit of her beloved one. A mother in our church recently described holding her baby close was like seeing her own heart existing outside her own body. I love that image. And, love is also letting our children go…a part of our heart go…leaving the safety of our direct care…that they might begin their own adventure of living a fully alive sort of life wherever God might lead…just like the parents of the high school seniors we are celebrating today [that we celebrated at the 9 AM service this morning] are just beginning to do. Love is the people who have given sacrificially from their life savings, or future retirement…and even more so time and energy…so that we could build this church that we gather in even now…a space for many other people beyond themselves to find love…and hope and healing and meaning and life-giving friendships with God and other people. Love is a parent who goes back to school at mid-life, while continuing to work and parent full-time, to better provide for their family. Love is the friend who stands with us, not only when we have been wronged but when we have done wrong. Love is the person who gives a hard-earned week of vacation…not to go to the beach…but to go to Navajoland. Love is the people who leave the security of well-paid careers to become educators or work in non-profits or ministry.
Love is by nature, indeed, heroic…and we may think first of the MLK’s, Desmond Tutu’s and Mother Theresa’s of the world when we think of a love like Jesus demonstrated for us on the cross…and rightfully so…but I also think equally of the person who sits at the bedside of a loved one as they pass into our Lord’s nearer presence so they know that are not alone. The person who cares well for an aging parent in the last season of their life that it might end surrounded by love, comfort and with dignity. The family who supports, holds and nurtures a child who is transitioning or coming out. The family who fights hard in a broken system for the healthcare their loved one needs to live and thrive. The altar guild member who comes here unseen for several hours on a Saturday so that our church looks this lovely on Sunday. I think of meals delivered to those grieving…of those knocking on legislators’ doors at the capitol downtown fighting for workers’ rights and healthcare access and equity in education. And, friends, I am describing you. For each sacrificial acts of love I have just described…has a real face in my mind attached to it…one of yours…the generous, sacrificial, Jesus-like lovers who are St. Julian’s. All of this is a powerful, life-giving expression of loving like Jesus on the cross…the pouring out of self for other…which is what love is…what love looks like…how we know it to exist...what Jesus means when he says love one another just as I have loved you.
And, I noted back at the beginning of this sermon that to really understand what Jesus’ new commandment meant, to love one another as he loves us, we have to come to those words from this side of Easter…this side of Jesus’ death and resurrection…for love, as I have described it, indeed, perhaps looks more like a cross than a budding flower or new-found infatuation. But, I would be remiss not to get to Easter…for it also has something important to say to us about what the love Jesus calls us to be and become is, or better said, what love does. For if love is only a cross…a sort of dying…a sort of death…if love’s purpose is only to suffer and sacrifice…we might rightly wonder what’s the point…why would we want to have any part in it. And, when we ourselves are loving others through great difficulty, loss, or sadness, when we help bear their pain, when we help carry their cross and suffer alongside them, when we pour ourselves out for them till we feel like we have nothing left to give, even as, challenges and suffering endure to no end, we might, understandably, come to the point of asking ourselves, again, what’s the point, what difference am I making…nothing in this broken world seems to change…no good seems to come from my loved poured out. And, it’s then…right then…in that very moment that we must remember Easter…it is both our encouragement and a promise. For, Jesus’ story ends not with a lifeless body hanging on a cross…but an empty tomb. You see, it is Jesus’ love for us, a willingness to give it all up for us, till his own heart beats its last…it is that all consuming, passionate love…that opens the grave and gate of death…that makes new life and new possibilities possible…hope for a different sort of love filled future possible…for us…and for those we love, serve, suffer and sacrifice for. In love, Jesus carried us…his heart…outside his body…on the cross…and it is that love that saves us…that opens the tomb…that makes Easter possible.
And the same is true for us, when we love like Jesus. For, Easter reminds us and is our great promise that the love we pour out and into the lives of others matters and makes a difference. God will take our love and care and attention and suffering and sacrifice poured out for the life of others and resurrect it into something altogether new and wonderful…for us and for those we have so powerfully and passionately loved. The 20###sup/sup### century English Poet, Ted Hughes, in a letter written to his son, says, “The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.”
Indeed, loving like Jesus always risks suffering and always requires courage…sometimes blood, sweat and tears are even required…but take heart…be bold…love deeply…expose your tender heart…don’t fear pouring your whole selves out…for we need…I need…the world needs…those suffering among us, friends and strangers alike, need…your Jesus shaped love…and Easter promises us that love, even our love with all of its blessings and limitations, is stronger even than death…none of our loved poured out will be lost…all will be resurrected. Just as we did right here on Easter Sunday, in the fullness of time, all the crosses we bear in love, our own and those we bear for others, will be covered in flowers…will spring afresh from forever to forever…through the glorious resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.