A Sermon preached on May 10th,
Easter VI, at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden
Acts 10:44-48, 1
John 5:1-6, John 15:9-17
There's
nothing you can do that can't be done
Nothing
you can sing that can't be sung
….
There's
nothing you can make that can't be made
No
one you can save that can't be saved
….
All
you need is love
All
you need is love
All
you need is love, love
Love
is all you need[1]
There’s a lot of
love in that Beatle’s song, and you also won’t find so much love packed into so
few lines anywhere else in the Bible than in today’s Gospel reading from John. "Love"
is mentioned nine times in just eight verses. Jesus loves the Father, the
Father loves Jesus, Jesus loves us, we are to abide in Jesus’ love, and we are to
love one another as he loved us. So is love really all we need? If loving one
another is the core Christian message, and as we heard a divine command, then
it would seem to be one that we’ve been consistently ignoring.
War is of course
the supreme example of how we ignore the command to love one another. Just 2
days ago, on May 8th, we commemorated the end of World War II, in
Europe. A war ignited by aggression and by hate, by the hatred of ethnic and
cultural minorities. And over the last two months I was personally confronted
with the memory of the two world wars. First when I was invited to preach at a service
in the city of Hanau commemorating the 70th anniversary of that city’s complete
– and from what I’ve read wholly unnecessary - destruction in a British bombing
attack. Then just a month ago when I joined a group of parishioners led by Jim
White on a visit to the battlefields of the Somme. However peaceful and bucolic
that area may now look, 100 years after the bloody battles of the First World
War, you only have to go into the woods to see the remains of trenches and the holes
made by the thousands of shells that exploded and killed and maimed the young
men fighting on all sides. And I had the feeling that there was a neat and tidy
and well-kept war graves cemetery around every corner!
Verse 13 of
today’s gospel reading was sorely abused and misused in that conflict. “No one
has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends,” Jesus
says. As the theologian Tom Wright has noted this was taken out of its original
context and used in ways that would have horrified the original writer. It was
used “again and again, in sermons and lectures, set to music and sung by great
choirs with one single meaning: therefore you, young man must go off to the
front line, do what you’re told and if necessary die for your country and your
comrades.”[2] This
was and is a complete perversion of what Jesus wanted to say in a passage that
is all about love and not about war and certainly not about power. We’re in the
middle of the so-called final discourse between the Last Supper and Jesus’
arrest and execution. Jesus wants his disciples to understand that his crucifixion
and cruel death will not be a sign of defeat, but of victory. It will not be a
sign of death, but of life, and certainly not a sign of hate, but of love:
Jesus’ love for his friends and his love for the whole world. That’s the
message of this verse – his death is the highest example of his love.
This love is not
an easy option. Whereas fighting often is. I’m not a pacifist, I believe there
are cases where armed intervention can be just and necessary. But war is still
never the best way of settling a dispute, and might is never right. As the writer of the first letter of John
puts it, the only victory that counts, the only victory that will eventually
conquer the world, is our faith (1 John 4) – in a God of love as seen in the
life, teaching, and acts of God’s Son, Jesus. Love saves us, but war destroys
us, both physically and spiritually. As Christians we are called to recognize the
value of all lives, of every human being as a child of God. War on the other hand
dehumanizes and turns people – both soldiers and civilians – into expandable
resources, an enemy, or just a target on a screen.
For Christians
love is not an option. It is a divine command and a pretty clear one at that: “This
is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” (John 15:13)
Of course the love that Jesus commands us to show and to share is not easy, nor
is just some soft emotion. Love is a call to action, to concrete acts of love.
Jesus already showed his love for his disciples and friends by acting as their servant
and washing their feet just before he started his final speech. Jesus will show
his love for us all in his death on cross. Jesus comes to us not just in the
water of Baptism but also in the blood of his death (1 John 5:5). Love is not something theoretical, and it’s
certainly not something that Jesus just recommends for others.
God in Jesus does
everything that love can do and creates the context in which we are free to
love in return. The “reward” for obeying this commandment is the joy we will experience
by pleasing the one who is all love and goodness. Obedience to God is not just a
matter of adhering to rules. It is also an intimate relationship, what the passage
calls abiding in God’s love, with the one who made and loves us. That brings
real joy.
Jesus has chosen
the disciples and chosen us who are his followers. We have been chosen and
appointed to go and manifest the life of God, to bear fruit that will last. In
the context of this passage that fruit can only mean signs and acts of love. I’m
not asking you to go out and stop wars, though I won’t stop you if you do! But
I am asking you to put the other first, to will the good of the other and to act
for the good of the other. The fruit that lasts can be all sorts of things that
result from that frame of mind. It might just be a single life changed because
we loved somebody as Jesus loves us. It can be a single decision to greet a
stranger, a single gift of time or attention, a single action through which the
world becomes a better place, even if just for a moment, even if just for one
person. All of these are the fruits of love and they will last for all
eternity. The more we put Jesus love into action, the closer we will get to him
and the more we will abide in his love.
The author GK
Chesterton, known among other things for his Father Brown detective stories, once
said: "Christianity has not been
tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.” That also applies
to the command to love one another – in whatever form it is given. Love too has
been found difficult and not tried, at least not enough.
I started with a
song by the pop group, the Beatles, and so I will finish with part of a prayer
by a spiritual pop star, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. I can only assume
that he had been reading the same Bible passages as we heard today when he
wrote this prayer in 1968, not long before his untimely death:
Oh
God, we are one with You. You have made us one with You. You have taught us
that if we are open to one another, You dwell in us. … Fill us then with your
love, and let us be bound together with love as we go our diverse ways, united
in this one spirit which makes You present in the world, and which makes You
witness to the ultimate reality that is love. Love has overcome. Love is
victorious.[3]
Amen.
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