"Final Instructions"  John 13:31-35

A Sermon Preached By

Rev. Peter W. Shidemantle

Fifth Sunday of Easter,  May 9, 2004

PEBBLE HILL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

5299 Jamesville Rd., Dewitt, NY  13214 

Phone:  315-446-0960

                                                                                    phillchu@twcny.rr.com

We’ve all been in the position of giving or receiving final instructions.  Before a performance, or a competition, an interview, an exam - a parent, a coach, a teacher, friend or mentor will say, "Now remember - keep you eye on the ball, relax and just have fun, watch that one passage, look into his eyes, keep your guard up..." We could think of scores of things that are said just before you’re out there on your own doing it, performing the task for which you have prepared and been instructed.

This is the way that Jesus’ words to his disciples are presented in what has been called his "farewell discourse" in the gospel of John. The setting is the Last Supper. He will be leaving them very soon - not that they are completely clear about that yet. Soon they will be on their own - fishing for people, making disciples of all nations, and all the rest. And this one last thing: "Love one another, as I have loved you."

A "new commandment" he calls it, though love for one another had always been part of the biblical witness, part of the life of biblical people, long before Jesus’ time. So what makes this commandment "new?" I think it must be the second phrase: "as I have loved you." They had seen his love, known it for themselves. They had seen how he embraced those whom all the respectable people shunned, how he invited fellowship with sinners and outcasts, how he noticed and engaged those whom others so easily passed by and ignored.

What astounding love! And he commands that we are to love one another like that.

Just how did Jesus love? St. Augustine observed long ago that Jesus loved each one he ever met as if there was no one else in the world to love. He radically individualized the love he acted out toward others. Unlike the tendency we know all too well, he never lumped people together in categories or classes. He always saw the genuine uniqueness of every human being. The second thing Augustine observed about how Jesus loved was that he loved all as he loved each. His love wasn’t only individualized, it was also incredibly universal. His eyes were never filled with contempt or disdain. Even when his words were harsh, it was because of a concern he felt for those whom he addressed - never words of hatred. He expressed anger, but never hostility, or even worse, indifference. He loved each one he ever met as if there were none other in all the world to love; and he loved all as he loved each.

Is that how we are to love? Would Jesus have given us this commandment if he didn’t think it were possible for us to fulfill it?

Oftentimes, when we give or receive final instructions, one more word is included: "Just do the best you can - that’s all anyone can ask." We say it all the time to our kids, and we’ve had it said to us. What more could anyone expect, really, than the best of which we are capable? But Jesus didn’t say, "Do the best you can with this love thing." He said, he commanded, "Love one another, even as I have loved you. This is how people will know you are my disciples." Are we really doing the best we can? Or do we sometimes/often say that when we know full well that we’re not? "I’m doing the best I can," we’ll say, when in fact it simply isn’t a priority for us. We see love of one another, love as Jesus loved, as an impossible ideal - and what chance do we have of achieving the ideal? We are imperfect people who live in an imperfect world, a dangerous world. Surely we must settle for a love that is less than ideal.

But it strikes me that there are a couple of things that happen to us when we view love of one another in this way. First, our love becomes hardened into place. If we are incapable of loving in the way that Jesus loved, then the best we can do is to love in the way, or to the extent, that we think is possible. Our love is limited, perhaps, only to those who are capable of loving in return, only to those known to us, only to our own kind - love that is comfortable and relatively safe (as if love could ever be "safe"- even with those closest to us). This is the attitude toward love that becomes hardened into the distinctions and divisions that separate us from one another. It can even become sacred practice, as Jesus addressed the distinctions and divisions that had come to be accepted and acceptable among the religious establishment of his own day and time: the unclean, the impure, the foreigner - those who were beyond love’s bounds. Surely we see the same thing today.

And the second thing that happens when we view love in this way is that we come to accept that no change, or growth, or transformation is possible. When our love becomes hardened into place, we become frozen in our ability to extend our love beyond comfortable bounds - and we are the poorer for it. Others are denied our love, and we are denied the discovery of deeper and richer life that can only come as we move out into the unexplored territories of our discipleship.

Of all the ways that Jesus loved his disciples - and there must have been a thousand ways that they knew his love for them - in the end they would know his love by his dying on the cross for them. In the end, that’s how he loved them, and how he loves us - by entering the deepest darkness of human hatefulness, being swallowed up by it. And in the confusing paradoxical language of the gospel of John this is what we get - in Jesus’ own words, that he is glorified (meaning, honored, blessed, lifted up) in the very act of being victimized by the powers and forces that bring evil and suffering and death. This is his "hour," he says, his "glory." His defeat is his glory. The cross is transformed by his love from an instrument of death to an instrument of life.

This is the great mystery of the cross. I do not claim to understand it more than that, to explain it more than that. I only know, because of his love, that the power of death and its stranglehold over life was broken there - and that, having broken that power, God hands our lives back to us again, saying, "Here, love one another just like that."

For God to matter to us in a way that makes any difference on our lives we somehow have to be in touch with this love that changes and transforms everything. It’s got to be in our minds and in our hearts, in our hands and feet. It’s got to stretch out from the cross and rise up out of the tombs of what is merely possible, showing a new way of life in the world that is not frozen, not captured by fear and assumption, but freed from the ways that death and its power have a stranglehold over life.

This is always new, because the power of death is always present, too, along with its partner, sin. They know what they are doing, these two. They know how to keep our world small and our boundaries close. They know how to keep us focused on ourselves and our own needs and concerns. They stroke our egos and cause us to regard others critically. If death is the final victor then it only makes sense to give only enough love to get along and receive only enough love to feel secure for the moment. We are very familiar with all the tried and true ways to do that. It’s not hard. It’s rather easy, in fact.

But love is always new. Love makes us weary with sin and tired of death as love seeks the new thing God is doing. Love opens up the world. It enters our isolation and builds community. It breaks through our need to acquire more and more and replaces it with a giving heart. Love enters our fear and helps us realize we are not alone, that there are others with the same fears, and in sharing them we can overcome them.

"A new commandment I give you, that you love one another, as I have loved you."

Think of it less as something imposed on you, required of you, than a gift given to you. For it is a gift, the gift of our freedom and our joy. We can receive that gift again today, as if for the first time, because love is always new, and you are loved by God as if you were the only one to be loved. Take it to heart. Let love do its work on you. Let its power take hold of you.

Receive this gift, and it will open up the ways that you might walk in newness of life. We have a hunch, each of us, where that walk needs to begin in ourselves. Each of us knows where life has narrowed for us, places where we’re frozen, where we need God’s newness to come into the tired and weary places in our souls. Let the love of Christ focus your gaze on the world, to see as he saw, with compassion and not indifference or disdain, and give you renewed strength to step out with hope, to leap out with joy, to reach out with renewed commitment to the life God so yearns for us, that the world so desperately needs from us.

Amen.

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