Love one another
Readings: John 13. 30-35
Jesus tells us today that the hallmark of his disciples is our love for one another. Which means we’re faced with the same question posed by Haddaway in his 90’s dance hit: What is love?
Jesus in today’s Gospel is speaking at the last supper. It’s the beginning of what is known as his farewell discourse which continues for the following 3 chapters of John’s Gospel until he prays for his disciples in chapter 17. But this section comes right after Jesus has washed his disciples’ feet, right after Judas has left to go and betray Jesus. And it’s at this point, right after revealing his love by stooping to the lowest place by washing their feet, right before he goes to the cross to further reveal his love by dying for them and for us, dying that we might live. Right at this moment he issues this command, love one another.
He calls it a new command, but in one sense it’s not a new, it’s right there in the Old Testament law, Leviticus 19. V18: ‘Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbour as yourself. I am the Lord’. But it does gain new clarity, new depth in Jesus’ words ‘As I have loved you, so you must love one another.’ And Jesus goes on to say that this is the hallmark of his disciples, this is how people will recognise that we belong to Jesus. Through our love for one another.
So what is love? If we are to be recognised by our love, what does that look like? Well, as you might expect of someone my age, I turned to Google to find out the answer. And here’s what the AI summary gave me: ‘Love is a multifaceted human emotion characterized by deep affection, attachment, and care for another person or thing. It can manifest in various forms, including romantic love, familial love, platonic love, and even self-love. Love is often described as a combination of intimacy, passion, and commitment’. It’s not a bad definition, but it’s rather lacking. It’s lacking because this definition is all about me, what I feel and what I get. Affection, attachment, care, intimacy, passion, commitment. Lots of those are about how we feel, and what we can expect to get. Intimacy, passion and commitment aren’t bad things, but is that all love is? Feeling close, feeling passionate? With an added side of sticking with one another?
Here’s another definition I’ve come across, love in our days is used as another word for acceptance. If you love me you’ll let me be who I want to be, do whatever I want to do. Love then means affirmation, keeping that closeness and passion and commitment whatever the other person wants to do. But is that love? Is love just wanting the other person to feel good, because that’s surely the most loving thing to do. The often used phrase: We just want you to be happy. Whilst so often as human beings we head off down roads we think will make us happy but that are utterly self-destructive. Just do what makes you happy as we drink ourselves into a stupor and stagger home on a Saturday night. Do what makes you happy as we jump from relationship to relationship finding little in the way of comfort. Do what makes you happy as we spend more than we could ever afford chasing the dream life we long for.
I’m not attacking people who do those things by the way, rather it’s a criticism of a culture that thinks love is just about rubber stamping whatever we think will make us happy. It falls flat because it rather assumes the individual is best placed to work that out, when actually we’re created for community. And it falls flat because it assumes we’re always going to naturally head towards the best things, become the best people we could be, and yet we’re fallen, we’ve crashed down from who we were created to be, which means we often, I don’t know about you, I often pick the wrong things. I think they’ll make me happy but in the end make me miserable. We’re not the best versions of ourselves, and we’ll often choose wrong when trying our best in pursuing happiness.
What is love? Here’s the good news. Jesus doesn’t leave us to work that out for ourselves, doesn’t leave us to work out what he means by this command, he roots it in himself, in what he has done. Love one another, as I have loved you. That’s the key, that’s how this all holds together. Jesus doesn’t just tell us to get on with loving others, go and be loving, he shows us what love is.
Love means sacrifice, that’s what’s missing from those other definitions. Wholehearted sacrifice for the other, not counting the cost to yourself. It’s thinking of others more highly than yourself and not using that to think you’re unimportant but to serve others as perhaps we might otherwise assume we should be served. Around this time last year we were reading through John’s first letter in our sermons and there John writes in ch3 v16: ‘This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters’. There on John’s lips are the echo of Jesus’ words, Jesus’ command. Love like Jesus does, by dying to self, laying down your life for your brother and sister Christians so that they may have life to the full. Not thinking of yourself, thinking of them. That’s what love is.
And that feels familiar in some ways to what our culture says about love, but in other ways its utterly radical. Because the world around us seems to be forgetting that sacrifice is a key part of what it means to love. So many friendships and relationships and even marriages thrown away because one or both parties don’t feel they’re getting anything from it anymore. The passion or intimacy has changed and so they can ditch the commitment too. So easily we shift the focus from what I can give to what I’m getting.
The love Jesus commands us to have for one another is a love that seeks to give rather than get. That longs to pour out rather than gather up. That gives and gives, not counting the cost. And there’s a handy side effect to that because if we all have that love for one another, if we’re all giving and not counting the cost, we’re not only giving abundantly, but receiving abundantly from our brothers and sisters. If we each give and give, all of us receive and receive. But the focus isn’t about what we get, but about what we give.
True love is a love that challenges. If we truly want what is best for one another that actually means thinking about what will really be best for the other. Which sometimes means some honest and frank conversations. Perhaps this isn’t the best thing, getting utterly wasted at the pub, this endless spin of relationships, racking up endless debt, perhaps there’s a better way. True love challenges, it’s honest, it’s even willing to be rejected for speaking the truth. It’s willing to make that sacrifice if, after gently and warmly, and kindly, seeking to show the other a better way, they do not turn, and instead walk away from us. True love loves the truth, even when it is hard.
Love is what is to define us, but it’s the love of Jesus, the love he reveals to us, that love must define us. Love done wrong is I think the greatest threat to us as Christians in this era. Either a loveless faith of perfect doctrine spoken coldly or even vindictively above others as we seek to be better than them. A moral perfection that sneers at others not doing so well, rushing to condemn rather than sweep up in care and compassion. We can speak the truth and be utterly hateful about it, using it to beat others down rather than invite them in. So, we can err by lacking in love entirely. But we can also err by loving as the world so often does, no truth, no challenge when the beloved strays, no sacrifice to lift others up. Just good vibes. But this is not how Christ loves us, who endlessly calls us onward, who gently challenges and rebukes when we go astray, who lays down his life to give us life.
My brothers and sisters, we are recognised as Jesus’ by our love for one another, a love that runs deeper than we can imagine. In some ways this is the simplest command imaginable, even a child can understand it, love one another as I have loved you. And yet living it out is utterly different, if we worked for a lifetime to perfectly walk in it we would still fall short. Because day by day we discover the depth of Christ’s love for us in the face of our sinfulness, and so we try and love others as Christ loves us, and as we try and love them as Christ loves us we realise we are falling short in that because of more of our sinfulness, and then we discover Christ loves us even in that. And so the cycle continues. But let us not be disheartened by that, let us learn day by day to walk in Jesus’ steps.
So what is love? To love one another is to love as Christ has loved us. Laying down our lives for our brothers and sisters, focussed on giving rather than getting. Gently challenging, speaking truth, yet filled with compassion and care. That’s love. And may that love, our love for one another, witness to a world that longs deeply for love, that here true love is found, of the God who gives all for our sake.
Amen.