TRISTAN SHERWIN

Here’s my message from this weeks Lectionary reading. As always, you can also listen to it on Metro Christian Centre’s YouTube page, just click here.

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READING: JOHN 13:1-14:1 (The Lectionary reading is John 13:31-35, but to provide context, it’s best to read from the start of the chapter)

PARTING WORDS

I still remember the last conversations I had with both of my parents before they died. In the case of my father, I remember him asking me to bring him a pen and a notepad the next time I visited him in hospital. Sadly, he passed away shortly after, and I never got the chance. I get the sense that he knew it was coming, and so my mind often wonders about what my Dad wanted to do with that pen and pad. I don’t think he just wanted to doodle a picture of Donald Duck. I suspect that he would have covered those pages with his heart and will.

I think that the parting words of most of us, if we knew it was coming, would be the most meaningful that we could think of. We certainly wouldn’t waste our time talking about trivial things like the weather or the latest sports results. No, our hearts would come to the fore and there would be an urgency and intimacy to what we would have to say.

That’s what is happening here at the end this passage.

Jesus knows his crucifixion is less than a day away—he is going to enter into his glory. And so he chooses to spend his final hours sharing the Passover meal with his disciples. As Luke records it, Jesus has been anxious to eat this Passover meal with them (Luke 22:15). In fact, Jesus is so keen to have this meal, that he has it the day before it’s supposed to be eaten.

Because it’s such an significant scene in the story of Jesus’ ministry, all four Gospels record this Passover meal (aka, the Last Supper). But unlike Matthew, Mark and Luke, John chooses not to tell us about the bread and the wine (although, they do appear in other ways within his gospel). Instead, John gives us a much longer version of this meal than the other accounts and mentions things that the other gospels don’t touch on at all. John records this scene of Jesus washing his disciple’s feet and, after Judas leaves the room, this ‘farewell discourse’ (these parting words) of Jesus: an urgent, heart-felt torrent of words that erupts at John 13:31 and flows all the way through to the end of John 17.

They’re probably the most intimate words within the gospels. Jesus is feeling the weight of leaving his disciples. He loves them. He’s only had a short time with them, and throughout that time, like most of us, they’ve struggled to grasp what it is that Jesus has being doing in their midst. There’s still so much that he wants to them to understand. So Jesus pours out his heart, giving them clarity into what God’s purpose has been all along.

Even as Jesus unloads his heart, they still don’t get it and they repeatedly interrupt him with their confusion; their most prominent question being, ‘Where are you going?’ (Like Peter does at the end of this chapter). Which is kind of comical: Jesus says some profound things in these chapters, but the disciples are like a stuck record and keep coming back, again and again, to Jesus’ first sentence about having to go away (it’s a good job John was paying attention!).

But I’m going to start at the beginning … (well, at verse 31, that is)

WHAT IS LOVE?

Judas has left the room, and with his departure a chain of events that will see Jesus arrested, tried and crucified has been started. Jesus senses the urgency of the hour. He tells his disciples that he has to go away; that he has to enter into his glory, and ‘So now’, Jesus says to his disciples, ‘I’m giving you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other. Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples.’ (v34-35).

Imagine that: As Jesus begins speaking, the most pressing thing that comes from his mouth is to give them a new commandment.

The thing is though, this commandment isn’t new!

The Old Testament already stressed the importance of loving God (Deut 6:5) and loving your neighbour (Lev 19:18). And Jesus knows this. When he was asked about which was the most important commandment, Jesus quoted both these verses, stating that no other commandment was as important as these (Mark 12:29-31). In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus is more explicit, saying, ‘All the other commandments and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments’ (Matthew 22:40). In other words, according to Jesus, the vocation to love is the most ancient of commands and the underlying melody of the entire scriptures.[i]

It’s not a new command—it’s the oldest rule in the book!

So how can Jesus say it’s new? Because it is not the command that is new, but the mode: we are to love one another in the same way that he has loved us. And this makes all the difference.

If it was just a matter of ‘Love’ in the abstract, then we would be left to adopt any definition of love that we felt most comfortable with. And sadly, some people’s definitions of love are toxic, neglectful and harmful.

At one end of the spectrum of ideas, to love somebody is understood as holding onto them and never letting them go. We understand that love is faithful—and it is; but love is not obsessive. It may sound romantic to ‘never let somebody go’, but with obsession that’s often manifested in a possessive, dominating and controlling fashion. Some people may call it affection, but its objectifying and dehumanising—it’s withholding freedom and autonomy from others and saying that they solely exist for our pleasure.

There’s no trust in this version “love”. There’s no mutual affection. There’s no freedom. No consent. It’s a prison; a choke hold. It doesn’t breathe life into others, but squeezes the life out of others in order to satisfy our own selfish drives. It’s not love, it’s not faithfulness—it’s abuse. Real, faithful love is always sacrificial towards another—it lays itself down.

For others, love looks like the very opposite of controlling people: it’s about not getting involved. It is love by absence: letting people do whatever they want to do, as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. We try and prop up this version of “love” by appealing to ideas of individual freedom—which I get; we’re not called to tyrannically rule people. But our apparent respect for people’s freedom is often a gloss of language over our apathy.

We say that our absence proves our love for others, but the truth is we just don’t care about them or their circumstances, their welfare or their actual freedom enough to make ourselves present and active their lives. We’re simply not interested until their circumstances threatens us.

Of course, hearing that implies that loving others means warning them about consequences, telling them “right” from “wrong”, or about challenging them on their choices and holding them accountable for those choices. And sure, there’s that aspect to it. However, it’s easy to do that kind of thing and believe that we are expressing love, when in fact all we are doing is shouting at people from a distance.

I’m not describing the volume of our voice or a physical distance, when I say that; but our lack of connection with those we’re are addressing. We’re often are not prepared to empathise with others and imagine what it would be like to walk in their shoes. We are not prepared to explore the reasons why some people have so little choice in the first place or what it is that is leading them to make wrong choices. We’re quick to see people as free agents—again, by appealing to their individual freedom—but we often fail to acknowledge that some people are prisoners and victims.

We call it love, but shouting from a distance is just the opposite face of the same coin as the version of “love” that leaves people alone. The problem with both of these expressions of “love” is the apathetic gulf that neither party is prepared to cross. They’re not co-suffering; they don’t identify with others; they don’t listen.

Surely, if loving our neighbour means anything, it at least involves crossing to the other side of the tracks and giving them our very lives and not just tossing them our penny’s worth of thoughts and sentiments (to echo a story Jesus once told).

For others, love has been reduced to purely being a matter of attraction; if you fit my mould, then I’m drawn to you. I’m not just speaking of romantic, fluttery feelings, but the wider sense of tribalism: we love those like us.

Life, according to this pattern of love, is populated by “us” and “them”. And by following the laws of attraction we interpret the command to love our neighbour not as loving our fellow humans in general, but as loving only a particular type of person who we determine to be worthy enough to be called our neighbour. Everyone else is an outsider at best and an enemy at worst.

We call it love, but it’s based on conditions and it’s twisted by favouritism. The truth is, we are more lenient and considerate towards those like us, those who like us, and those we like, than we are towards those who aren’t like us, those who don’t like us, and those we dislike (and it’s best not to ask what we’re like with those we hate).

And last but not least, there is—according to the song—the greatest love of all: learning to love yourself. Hey, I’m not going to deride this one too much: self-care is essential, but narcissism is deadly. Our world is full of anecdotes about the importance of loving ourselves. I get it, I do. But if the world functioned as it did, and we genuinely loved one another as we should, then maybe we wouldn’t need to retreat into ourselves in a last-ditch attempt to find some sense of value.

The thing is—and I’m saying this as someone who struggles with depression and self-esteem—that whenever I resort to self-love, it always feels sort of counterfeit; like I’m playing with an imaginary friend. But when you find yourself being unconditionally loved by something outside of you, well, that’s just life-changing.

You see if the command was just to love, if we’re left to our own devices to decide what that means, then we can define loving our neighbour/loving one another however we feel. And we can do so in a way that furnishes us with a million and one loop-holes and get-out clauses; giving us enough wiggle room to avoid actually loving one another.

And so, in a world that is often confused and deluded by so many abstract ideas about love, God comes and gives us a concrete example.

LOVE IN THE FLESH

God so loved the world that he gave his very expression to it so that it would not continue to perish but that it would flourish as intended (to paraphrase John 3:16).

Hear the empathy, the sensitivity and the faithfulness that is expressed in that verse!

God is not an abuser; God is not controlling. God is not apathetic and indifferent. God does not shout at us from across some cosmic void. God’s love is not conditional—it’s not tribal—God dies for those who dislike him; for those who would kill him.

God’s love is liberating. God’s love is sympathetic. God’s love leads God to become incarnate. God’s love is not some spiritual delusion—it’s not God sending us some loving sentiments and encouraging thoughts; God’s love has flesh to it. God dwells with us, and serves us, and reaches out to heal, restore, and rescue the last, the lost, the least and the lifeless. God’s love leads him to get his hands dirty and washing the feet of humanity. God’s love is co-suffering and self-emptying.

God’s love is so great for us, that whilst we were dead in our sins, God came and raised us from the dead (Ephesians 2:4-10). Or as John’s Gospel puts it, ‘He didn’t come to condemn us, but to save us’ (John 3:17). Or to put that another way: God doesn’t come and beat us up because we’ve lived in a dark prison for so long; he comes and switches on the light, flings open the prison door, and says ‘follow me out of here.’

You see, we’re not left with our own abstract definition of love. What is love? What does it look like? Well, to use something that John would write later, “God is Love” (1 John 4:16). God incarnate—Jesus—gives us a concrete image of what love is and what extents love will go through.

As Jesus himself says in this farewell discourse, ‘Here’s how you measure love: the greatest love is shown when people lay down their lives for their friends!’ (John 15:13). The things is, Jesus pushes the bar up on that one too, and lays down his life for his enemies. (Romans 5:6-11).

THE BENCHMARK

This is huge: Jesus tells his disciples that they are to love one another with the same intensity of love that he has loved them with!

It’s not just an empty sentiment; it’s not Jesus saying, ‘You know guys, it would be really great if you could get on with one another after I’m gone.’ There’s a deeper purpose behind this commandment: it’s the evidence to the watching world that we are Jesus’ disciples.

As with the foot washing, Jesus is asking his disciples to look back on his way of life and see an example, a pattern for how they are meant to live. Jesus is asking his disciples to reflect him; to bear his image.

Why? Because Jesus is the visible image of the invisible God (Colossians 15) and humanity has always been called to reflect God’s nature; to bare God’s face; to bare the image Jesus has made clear to us. And the proof that we are reflecting God—the proof that we are a reflection of what Jesus is like—is to be found, and only found, in our love for one another: do we love like Jesus loved?[ii]

We can’t make the proof anything else! The proof is not that we can do the miraculous. The proof is not in our ability to win intellectual arguments. The proof is not that we wear a cross around our neck-line, or a badge that says “J.I.M”, or a wristband that says “W.W.J.D?”, or that we place a fish sticker on the bumper of our cars. It’s not in our creeds, or our ability to quote scripture, or that we attend church meetings, or that we build beautiful cathedrals—the evidence is not in any of that! Neither is the proof of our discipleship in our titles (Bishop, Pastor, Apostle, Evangelist, etc.) or our spiritual gifts.

Something in me thinks it would have been easier to be known by some other standard: a uniform would be nice. But the benchmark is faithful, sympathetic, humble, self-emptying, co-suffering love.

It’s also important to say that this commandment is not something Jesus just gets out of the way before moving onto more important things. This ‘love one another’ forms the bookends to his farewell discourse—and it consistently pops up in between (e.g. John 15:12)

Right at the end of John 17, as Jesus prays to the father, he comes back to this important witness of our love for one another: ‘My prayer is that they would be one…Then the world would know that you sent me and will understand that you love them as much as you love me’ (John 17:21, 23b, italics mine). There’s something about our passion for one another that is supposed to re-enact and embody God’s passion for the world at large.

We’re meant to model an alternative humanity. Jesus didn’t come to make us into gods over others. The Holy Spirit wasn’t sent to turn us into angels. The life Jesus invites us into is about demonstrating how beautiful humanity was supposed to be. That if we reflect God, people would know that God loves them.

The Catholic writer, Brennan Manning, once wrote that he longed for the church to be known as community of professional lovers, adding that, ‘If we as a Christian community took seriously that the sign of our love for Jesus is our love for one another, I am convinced it would change the world. [But because we don’t], we’re denying to the world the one witness that Jesus asked for.’[iii]

We are called to bear God’s image in the world, but it is impossible to this whilst side-stepping the command to love one another. Without loving one another, we may sound good, we may look good, we may present ourselves as nice, honest people; but we won’t look a thing like God.

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ENDNOTES:

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[i] Paul also understood that the command to love is nothing new. In Romans 13:8-10, Paul says, ‘Owe no one anything, except to love one another, for the one who loves his neighbour has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, ‘Do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not covet,’ (and if there is any other commandment) are summed up in this, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbour. Therefore love is the fulfilment of the law.’ (NET). (See also Galatians 5:13-15).

[ii] See also 1 John 4:12-21

[iii] Brennan Manning, The Furious Longing of God (David C. Cook, 2009), p.89.