Jesus said, “My children, I will be with you only a little while longer. I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another. This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13.33-35)
Four years ago this week, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were married in St. George Chapel at Windsor Castle. Bishop Michael Curry, the African-American leader of the Episcopal Church in the United States, warmed the hearts of millions who watched the nuptials on TV when he preached to the gathered assembly for thirteen minutes on the power of love.
Among other memorable things he said were these words, “We were created by love, for love, to love and to be loved. And we are at our best when we live in God’s love. And I believe, deep down, it’s what we all want. We don’t want hatred. We don’t want the abyss. We want Beloved Community.”
In many ways, he was simply echoing the words of Rabbi Jesus, who spoke to his followers about the power of love when he addressed them during his final meal with them, his crucifixion on the horizon, his betrayer moments before stepping out of the room to grease the wheels that would bring about his execution at the hands of the powerful of Jerusalem.
We hear a small part of this so-called “Farewell Discourse” in our selection from the Gospel of John that is offered to us today for our consideration. “I give you a new commandment,” Rabbi Jesus says to them, “Love one another.” Then, should there be any question as to what he means by love, he spells it out concretely for them, “As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.”
And, should they equivocate and obfuscate the importance of this commandment, Rabbi Jesus pinpoints love as the one defining characteristic of his followers. “This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another,” an identification that is often ignored or relegated as Christians choose to elevate other characteristics as identifiers of their allegiance to Rabbi Jesus.
But Rabbi Jesus allows no such wiggle room for those who would want to claim discipleship while at the same time failing to practice the commandment of love. Regardless of what is substituted for or elevated to the high ranking, the absence of love immediately and unilaterally removes the person from the rank of disciple, the failure to love negating the singular litmus test for any authentic discipleship.
Decades later, Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, reiterated the same message, telling the people of Corinth, “If I speak with the languages of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. If I dole out all my goods to feed the poor, and if I give my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.”
One wonders, then, how and why so many who claim discipleship fail to see that twice as much of anything else still does not equal the commandment of love, not church attendance, not charitable causes, not hours on one’s knees in prayer. The only possible answer is that we have found the commandment to love too difficult and so have substituted easier practices in the hope that God won’t notice the substitution, assuming and hoping his taste buds aren’t delicate enough to discern the difference between sugar and splenda.
Reckless and mindless, our less than honest discipleship does not fool God for one simple reason–God is the originator of love. He is its source and its authenticator. His discerning eye determines in a heartbeat if we’re imitating divine love or if we’re scam artists. And while we may fool others, we can never fool him, regardless of how good we are at forgery. The luminosity of genuine love can never be generated by anything less than a human heart that flows with divine self-giving.
In the popular movie, Belfast, the story is told of a nine-year old boy named Buddy who lives in the Northern Ireland capital during the tumultuous 1960s, a time collectively called the Troubles, with Catholics and Protestants at each other’s throats. At one point during the movie, young Buddy confides to his dad that he is smitten with Catherine, a pretty girl at his school. He asks his dad if he thinks there’s any chance for the two of them.
“Why the heck not?” Pa answers. Buddy says, “But you know she’s a Catholic.” Pa kneels down so that he can look into the face of his son. He says to him, “That wee girl can be a practicing Hindu, or a Southern Baptist or a Vegetarian Antichrist. But if she’s kind and she’s fair, and you two respect each other, she and her people are welcome in our house any day of the week.”
Hearing his dad speak those words, Buddy begins to understand that love, if it is the real thing, cannot be restricted by the categories and labels that we humans are so fond of, arranging everyone in the same way as we organize our pantries, fruits and vegetables on different shelves, paper goods up high, flour and sugar within easy reach.
One look at the life of Rabbi Jesus and even the lackadaisical observer walks away seeing that the Galilean Teacher refused to label people, however convenient and however ordinary the practice was. Instead, he saw each person as reflecting the beautiful, irreplaceable image of the Most High God, and he fell in love with every last one of them on the beaten paths of Galilee that he walked.
Tattered beggars. Worn-out and used-up women of the street. Foul-smelling lepers with deformed limbs. Double-dealing tax-collectors. Crazy lunatics. Hapless heathens. Blind-as-a-bat Bartimaeus. All of them recipients of the love that flowed from the human heart of Rabbi Jesus, filled to the brim with divine love from his Father in heaven, channeled to one and all alongside the roadways of Galilee.
Unlike us, Rabbi Jesus was not miserly in his love, refusing to see it as a limited quantity or as a rare commodity saved for the truly deserving, as we do. His love had no shut-off valve. Like the abundance of new wine at the wedding in Cana or the overabundance of food at the picnic for thousands on the side of the mountain or the overstuffed fishing nets hauled ashore at the Sea of Galilee, his love expanded beyond fixed definition, flooded over fortified levees, and swept up people in a roaring wave of compassion and mercy.
It is that same love that Rabbi Jesus puts before his followers on the night before his execution, entrusting to them the standard he had set, calling them to be his standard bearers in the world, a world too often bloated by greed, blinded by self-interest, and broken apart by loathing of anyone a smidgen different than oneself.
If we are to fulfill that call to follow him, then our life’s effort must be in the service of that same love, an active, life-giving, extensive love. Anything less and we are frauds. Or lukewarm, meaning unremarkable, which, according to the writer of the Book of Revelation, deserves to be spat out of the mouth, since it neither satisfies nor strengthens the one who is thirsty.
In his recent book, Love is the Way, Bishop Curry expands further on his sermon on love that he preached at the royal wedding, challenging Christians to become the community of all God’s children envisioned by Rabbi Jesus, sharing a loaf of bread, washing the feet of the stranger who has traveled far, and welcoming the other to our table, since, after all, we are all brothers and sisters.
At some point in the book, he tells the story of how his father–also an Episcopal priest–came to the Episcopal church. He says that his father had been raised a Baptist and his mother was raised an Episcopalian. One Sunday, when they were dating, his mother invited his father to her church. They were among the few Black worshippers in the church that day.
He writes, “My father was amazed, but dubious, when it came time for Communion. The priest welcomed everyone to receive the body and blood of Christ–and from a single communal chalice! Again, this was the 1940s. Jim Crow was alive and well. It was the North, but segregation and separation of the races was still the law of the land. And my father saw one cup which everyone was to drink from. One cup! One cup?”
Bishop Curry continues, “My father hung back, as my mother went forward. He wondered if the priest would really offer the communion cup. And if he did, would others continue to drink from the same cup? He held his breath as my mother sipped. As the cup was passed, the next person did drink. And the next. And the next.”
“When he told that story,” Bishop Curry says, “he would always say, ‘Any church in which Blacks and whites drink from the same cup knows something about the Gospel that I want to be a part of.’ And so my mother led my father down a path that he probably would never have taken for himself–love in action.”
As we hear those words, we better understand what Rabbi Jesus meant when he said to his followers, “My children, I will be with you only a little while longer. So I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another. This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
Today, in a world whose air and airwaves are polluted by hate and hateful ways, fermenting believers into following a gospel of hate, we are challenged to be visible and vibrant reminders of the gospel of love, lived and preached by the Galilean, who called for the recreation of the world, replacing rivers of hatred with flowing streams of love. If we fail to love as he loved, then we will not be known as his followers, at best as second-rate imitations, without bragging rights regardless of our braggadocio.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 