He is us and we are Him. May 9, 2021. The Rev. David M. Stoddart

John 15:9-17

So . . . Can I make you love me? I don’t think so. In fact, if I went around trying to force people to love me I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t have any friends at all. I know I cannot make you all love each other. And none of us can make rich people love poor people, or white people love black people, or — God forbid — make Republicans and Democrats love each other. Love as that Greek word agape expresses it involves a level of self-emptying that can only be freely given. That kind of love cannot be forced. And yet in the Gospel today Jesus commands us to love. In this very short passage some form of the word command occurs five times. Can Christ do that? Can he make us love?

I suppose we could say that love is an action, not a feeling, and that we can do loving actions regardless of how we feel. And we could come up with a long list of such actions that Jesus wants us to do: turn the other cheek, give money to the poor, show hospitality to strangers, care for the sick, and so on. And we could assert that Jesus orders us to do these things, so we should do them. The problem with that approach is that it just puts us back into a religion of rules. And we don’t need Jesus for that: we already have plenty of laws in the Old Testament — 613 of them to be exact. So whether we view Jesus’s commandments as adding to them or replacing them, we still end up in the same place: faith means following the rules — or else.

But I am convinced that is not the way we should hear this Gospel. The commandment to love can only be understood in light of what Jesus has already told his disciples, that he will abide in them, and they will abide in him, that their love will be his love, and his love will be their love. The key to this passage is that amazing statement: abide in my love. Live in my love. It’s not even enough to behave like Jesus. The only way to comprehend the commandment to love others as Jesus loves us is to grasp in the deepest possible way that he is us and we are him. I like the way the Jesuit writer Anthony de Mello puts it:

You know, sometimes people want to imitate Christ, but when a monkey plays a saxophone, that doesn’t make him a musician. You can’t imitate Christ by imitating his external behavior. You’ve got to be Christ. Then you’ll know exactly what to do in a particular situation, given your temperament, your character, and the character and temperament of the person you’re dealing with. No one has to tell you. But to do that, you must be what Christ was. An external imitation will get you nowhere. 

You are my friends; I chose you, I lay down my life for you; I breathe my Spirit into you; I will live in you. Abide in my love. That is the way. 

When we abide in Christ, it’s no longer about rules and commandments. When his love is our love, then the only commandment that matters is to love like he does. But that commandment doesn’t function like any other: it’s not a negative prohibition or an added responsibility, one more thing to do. It is more like that great commandment God gives to all creatures in Genesis: Be fruitful and multiply. It’s like God commanding Mozart to compose music or God commanding Einstein to think or God commanding Sojourner Truth to speak out for justice . The commandment to love is God saying to us, “Fulfill your destiny. Be who I created you to be.” This is why our epistle reading today says that the commandment of Jesus to love is not burdensome, because it’s just a call to drop our defenses and be our truest selves.

Be our truest selves. The same love which draws quarks and atoms together to form grass, trees, clouds, sun, and moon, the same love which fills the universe and holds 2 trillion galaxies together is in us. That love is fully realized in Jesus Christ, but only so that we can share in it, too. John’s Gospel pushes the limits of language to describe this: we are enfolded in the love that Jesus has for his Father and the Father has for him, we are filled with the Spirit of Christ, we abide in love. But the words are just words unless they help us experience the truth for ourselves. We are love. The energy of love is the core of our being. We can ignore it or we can resist it, and all too often we do, but doing so just denies the truth of who we are.

Years ago, in the first church I served in as a priest, I had a parishioner who was a school nurse. She was always surrounded by children, and of course dealt with lots of sick and upset kids. But she just loved doing it, loved caring for those children. And she was good at it. I’m sure she had hard days, but her ability to do what she did with such warmth and good humor really touched me. I commented on it one day, and she just smiled and said, “I was born to do this.”

It is our joy, each in our own unique way, to manifest the love of Christ which is the love of God which is the love that flows through all of us. John’s Gospel doesn’t lay out a program for that, because there is no program, no method, no set of rules. What matters is that we abide in love. So we worship and we pray and we remind each other of who we are. Deeper than the busyness and distractions of life, deeper than our selfish concerns and ambitions, deeper than our frail and demanding egos, we are love. When Jesus commands us to love, he is telling us to be our truest selves. Everything else flows from that.