Loving one another
Fifth Sunday of Easter
Remember from last week? I’m the vine, Jesus tells us, and you are the branches. Your job is to abide in me because through me you have life. You need to hold on, and you need to be fruitful. If you are not being fruitful, then the life of the vine is not flowing through you and you have already separated yourself from the source of life. If you are being fruitful and you want to keep being fruitful - well then you need to submit to being pruned and shaped and disciplined by my love.
This is Jesus in truth-telling mode, it is the hard news of accountability - and it’s softened by the verses that come immediately after, in the passage we read this morning. Because after last week we might be asking ourselves - well, how? How do we do that?
To abide with me, Jesus tells us today, you just need to keep my commandments. To have an enduring part with me, you need to do what I say. And what I command is that you love one another. If you love one another as I have always loved you, then you will bear fruit, you will never be separated from me, and your joy will be complete. Well, this sure sounds like the good news, doesn’t it? All we need is love - and notice too that in this passage Jesus is saying the sort of self-giving love that needs to characterise the Christian community is the same sort of love as that between Jesus and his Father. In other words the Christian community is supposed to be modelled on the community of divine love. It’s how we do the abiding.
But I wonder sometimes if we have really worked out the implications of this. Let’s face it, church communities are not always very loving. Not always very welcoming of outsiders, not always very good at practical love towards people who really need it. I remember the story of a meeting between church leaders and Aboriginal activists back in the heady days of the Mabo case and the struggle for recognition of native land title back in the 90s. This was in WA, though it could have been anywhere in Australia. Well, there was a lot of careful political language being used. Eventually an elderly Aboriginal woman got to her feet and looked around the room – at the white Church leaders – and said, ‘you know what? It doesn’t matter what the New Testament says, most Christians don’t know what community is’. And then she said, ‘OK, let’s pretend you were really Christians. And you really loved each other and us instead of just talking about it. That’d look a bit different, wouldn’t it?’ Incidentally a very similar process is playing out right now, with Tasmanian Aboriginal Minister Garry Deverell holding the churches to account for their defensive self-justifications at the Victorian Truth Commission hearings.
When Jesus gave his disciples the command to love each other, the night before he died, though they didn’t know it yet the little community of men and women who followed him was about to implode and self-destruct – fragmented and shamed by their own inability to stay with Jesus through the dark hours of his trial and crucifixion. Seventy or so years later the little Christian community that the first letter of John addresses is facing its own trial of persecution and ostracism, and it seems that some in the community are tempted to close the doors, keep a safe distance from a world that has become hostile and critical. This sort of ineffectual spirituality is called quietism, and whenever it happens it is always a sign of a church that has lost confidence, lost its way. Because if Jesus really calls us to love each other as he loved us – calls us, in other words, to love in the same way that he loved – then it’s a very different ethic than the behind closed doors version of spirituality, isn’t it? What Jesus models for us is not the sort of love that hides or insulates itself from the world, but the sort of love that transforms the world. When John’s Gospel and the three short letters up the back of the New Testament that come out of the same tradition talk about love they aren’t talking about being a cozy club of the like-minded - what they are talking about is an ethic of love in action that is assertive and enduring and takes risks.
Because how is it exactly that Jesus loves? Well he loves his friends, for sure, patiently teaching them even when they just don’t get it. And he loves strangers and outcasts and sinners, eating and talking with them and healing and serving and enduring insecurity and loneliness and danger for them. And he also loves his enemies, forgiving and praying for them. He tells us to love both neighbours and enemies, and he challenges our limited view of who they might be. Like secateurs, Jesus’ command to love has got a sharp edge of challenge. It gives us as a Christian community nothing less than a clear template for forming our values and framing our actions in every situation – it cuts though our 21st century sophistication with a directness that exposes our self-centredness. Ask yourself this about every decision or plan, or about every attitude or opinion – does this grow out of love? Is this based in the sort of love that expects nothing in return, or is it self-serving? Is this going to bear the fruit of love for everyone Jesus insists is my neighbour, or is it just going to bear the fruit of self? Honestly, I’m not sure how well my inner life or my actions stand up to that test. But it’s the only test that counts.
The sort of love Jesus commands us to cultivate has got little resemblance to the glossy Hallmark version, the essentially self-serving romantic mythology of the modern age. The sort of love that the Gospel calls agape means simply to be other-centred rather than self-centred. Agape love heals and includes and forgives – and critiques and tells the truth and stands up for justice. Agape love is not comfortable, it costs us something as we extend it. It isn’t safe, it can be messy and we never know quite where it is going to take us. But it gives life, both to those on the receiving end and those who take the risk of extending it. Agape love, in other words, is humble service. And only agape love can fulfil the command of Jesus by loving in the same way Jesus loved.
What does it look like when we try that? There are Christian communities who basically decide not to, who decide instead to become just a lifestyle choice, a safe Sunday morning club. But they are not following Jesus. So what would we look like as a community church if we tried loving like Jesus loved? Have we done that sometimes? Have we sometimes been disruptive, radically welcoming of strangers and of new ideas, selfless and outgoing in hospitality and kindness? How did that work out? And what does it look like whenever we fail to love in the way that Jesus commands us? When we are over-careful, self-protective, defensive and selfish and mistrustful? When we hold on to old hurts, when we refuse reconciliation, when we reject one another’s gifts or refuse welcome? How would that work out for a community church?
So, we’re a bit like the teenagers who inherited the vineyard. Last week’s reading was about accountability and hard choices, today’s is about love which the Gospel consistently reframes for us as humble service. And the gold at the root of the vines? Is joy. Jesus promises in today’s reading that if we really take the risk of loving, then our joy will be complete.
Well, how’s that? Especially when the way of humble love can be hard work, and self-sacrificial, and all too often attracts opposition? Well of course joy is not quite the same thing as fun, or entertainment - which all too often we modern people seem to think we are entitled to as the flip side of commitment. Also joy is not quite the same thing as happiness, the more transient reaction to good news or good times that of course we all do need in due proportion. Joy is something altogether deeper-seated, a deep-down sense of delight that comes from living in a way that is congruent with who we really are - the deep-down sense of harmony between our own lives in relationship and the trinitarian life of God. We experience joy when our lives mirror the self-giving life that is God’s own life, even when we have to live through times of hardship or loss. And this joy is the source of strength - of buoyancy in all the storms of life, and of hope in the future to which God is leading us.
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