May 18, 2025
When he had gone out,
Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified
in him. If God has been glorified in
him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little
longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you,
'Where I am going, you cannot come.'
I give you a new
commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also
should love one another. By this
everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one
another."
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A
lot of the time we equate sharing God’s love with the organized, definable,
hands-on, programmatic things we do. We
are good at that, and they are the right things to do. We cook meals. We send clothing. We provide presents at Christmas. We help students in Africa get to college and
home again. But just as important as
what we do is who we are, or who the Holy Spirit is helping us to become.
Are
we the type of people who treat other people with dignity even though they
don’t meet Tik-Tok’s standards of appearance or hipness? That matters.
Do we at least try to listen to people who for whatever reason cannot
really put their thoughts together? That
matters. When we are the sort of people
who say, “How are you doing?” and really mean it; when we consider the way we
speak as well as what we say; when we learn the names of the people down the
block; when we take time for one another; when we slow down occasionally enough
to notice what’s going on beyond our own small circle – all of that
matters. When we look for the best in
God’s children, and when we reflect it back to them so that they can see God’s
love for them, it makes a huge difference, whether we know it or not.
None
of that is automatic, and all of it takes work, some of which may go against
the grain. The setting that John gives
us for Jesus’ words about loving one another is his announcement at the last
supper that he would be betrayed, and then Judas leaving the room to do exactly
that. That’s what the passage refers to
as it begins, “When he had gone out”; the “he” there is Judas,
and his “going out” is his departure to summon the guards who will
arrest Jesus and hand him over to be tried.
Then Jesus tells the rest of the group, who still don’t know what Judas
is up to,
“I give you a new commandment, that you
love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By
this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one
another."
So how much love do you
think the other disciples had for Judas when they found out what he did? How disappointed do you think they were when
they learned of his end? Perhaps that is
exactly why Jesus spoke as he did, when he did.
We don’t have to be reminded so much
to love the people who love us, or to speak well of the people who say kind
words about us, or to be thoughtful to the people we like and like being
around. We do have to be reminded, or as
Jesus says, “commanded” to love the people we cannot stand.
“I give you a new commandment, that you
love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”
Jesus love for us
is of a type that forgives (and here I first wrote, “overlooks”, but that is
wrong – our sins are not overlooked but are clearly seen and sharply felt, but
forgiven all the same, which is all a part of what is so amazing about God’s
love in Jesus). Jesus love for us is of
a type unlike the normal, natural affection that holds families and communities
and maybe even nations together.
Here’s how Matthew repeats Jesus’
teaching about love:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You
shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But
I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so
that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on
the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the
unrighteous. For if you love those who love you,
what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And
if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others?
Do not even the gentiles do the same? Be perfect,
therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” [Matthew
5:43-48]
There’s not a lot
of hearts-and-flowers in that. What is
there is challenge and a call to love in a way that is definitely going to look
naïve, that may be ridiculed as weak or blind, and that dares to expect the
enemy’s heart and mind and life to be changed by the power of the Lord himself.
Peter Storey tells of the time while
he was pastor of Central Methodist Church in Johannesburg that the church
building was desecrated and defaced in the middle of the night. Days later, they discovered that the vandals
were governmental security forces trying to pin it on anti-apartheid activists
the church had welcomed and advocates for the poor who were doing subversive
things like feeding the hungry from the church’s kitchen. In his sermon the following Sunday, Storey
confessed,
“When I first saw the violence done to this house of
God, I had an overwhelming longing to see the faces of those who had done it
and to lash out at them; but that first, instinctive reaction was a
mistake. It is like blaming the boil for
the poison that is in the blood stream.
Far more dangerous and evil than the people who did
this are the forces that drive them: hatred, prejudice, ideological
imprisonment, fear, untruth – these are the enemies of us all. These are the superhuman forces against which
we wrestle…”
And of the people
who had smeared graffiti and hate on the church walls he said,
“They bow to the idols that so many worship in this
land, but they do not know the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
That’s why, if we identify them, we will prosecute
them, and when they are found guilty, I shall ask the magistrate to sentence
them to worship here every Sunday for six months.
· To
sing with us,
· To
pray with us,
· To
pass the peace of Christ with us, .
· To
hear the liberating Good News of God’s grace with us,
· To
break bread with us,
· So
they may find God!”[1]
Ask
yourself this: What does it mean to be given the power to love and then not to
love? What does it do to us as Jesus’
followers to pray, day by day, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive …”? Love becomes an imperative. By God’s grace it may even an instinct, one
that is counter to natural instinct to put yourself first. By God’s grace, we learn to see through the
false standards and practices that the world teaches and celebrates. To know God’s love and experience his care
and then not to share them becomes like sitting on a park bench and
eating your lunch with a homeless person sitting at the other end watching. How long can you do that without some small
sense of shame until you at least offer them some potato chips or carrots or a
cookie or something? It’s not a perfect
analogy, but I hope you know what I mean.
The
love of God isn’t just something we know about.
It’s who we are made to be.
[1] Peter
Storey, “Sentence Them to Church!” in “With God in the Crucible” (Nashville:
Abingdon Press, 2002), 117-118.
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