FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER — C
Acts 14:21-27
Revelation 21:1-5
John 13:31-35
“This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” You know someone is a soldier because of their uniform. You can recognize Pope Leo because he has on white papal robe. You can recognize a Jewish man because he wears a yarmulka. Jesus does not propose any distinguishing clothing or mark for his followers. Love for one another is supposed to be what distinguished Christians from the rest of the world. By that criterion, the disciples of Jesus have sure made it hard to recognize them over the ages. Christians have waged war on one another. Christians have persecuted one another. Christians have burned other Christians at the stake. Christians have discriminated against other Christians. Christians have shunned other Christians who looked different from them or came from a different nation or spoke a different language. Christians have used, abused and misused other Christians. How will all know that we are disciples of Jesus given that sad history?
For that matter, what is this crazy little thing called love anyway. I want to know what love is, as one song goes. It must be more than a second-hand emotion with all due respect to Tina Turner. Popular song gives us many definitions of love. Is love more than feeling, a many-splendored thing, all the seven wonders? Is it okay to sing “if loving you is wrong, I don’t want to be right?” What happens when you lose that loving feeling? Is love something you can’t help falling into — or out of? Will love keep us together? Can we truly sing “I will always love you?” What is the power of love? And what do these societal explorations of love have to do with Jesus’ understanding of love?
Of course, part of the problem is that the English language uses the one word “love” to cover a wide range of human endeavor. We love pizza and Star Wars and the White Sox and a day at the beach. We love reading and learning and exercising and napping. We love our friends, our relatives, our spouse and our pets. We make that one word do too much work. The Greek language, the language in which the Gospels were written, had at least four different words that we would translate as “love.” We have to dig a little to recover what Jesus is talking about when he says that Christian must have “love for one another.” Maybe one way of thinking about it is to imagine a mother and child. The child says, “Mommy, I love you.” And the mother answers, “I love you too, pumpkin.” Are they saying the same thing? Last week on Mother’s Day there was a report on the radio where they asked children what did it mean to love their mother. They all answered with some variation of “I love her because…” Because she takes care of me, because she is good to me, because she hugs me. If they had asked mothers that same question – what does the love of your child mean? – they would answer “Because I love her…” Because I love her I sacrifice for her, I do for him, I make time for them, I think of them before myself. The shift from “I love her because … ” to “Because I love her …” goes to the heart of the Biblical understanding of love.
The Bible says that God is love. To understand the true meaning of love requires an encounter with God. Our starting point for the meaning of divine love is found in Jesus. The love that Jesus embodied is in the “because I love…” camp. Jesus doesn’t love us because we deserve it. because we said our prayers or kept the commandments or went to church on Sunday. No, God loves us first, before we do any of those things. And because God loves us Jesus shared a human life, even to the point of suffering and death. Because Jesus loves us his death opens the doorway for us to have life and have it to the full. Because Jesus loves us we learn it is more blessed to give than it is to receive. The example of Jesus shows that love is not something you get, but something you do. For the Bible love is an action.
That is the background for how Christians through the ages have messed up so badly — not looking like disciples of Jesus by loving one another. When you look at the history you see some stinkin’ thinkin’ on the part of Christians: “I love you because you have the right teachings. I love you because you practice the correct religious devotions. I love you because your lifestyle agrees with mine.” That kind of thinking led to crusades and inquisitions and excommunications. We must shift our way of thinking to “because I love you.” Because I love you, I will help you to grow in wisdom, age and grace. Because I love you, I will do all that I can to bind up your wounds and heal your hurts. Because I love you just as you are, the way God loves you, I will treat you as the precious creation you were made to be.
A love story: once upon a time a warlord told his general to go to the enemy city and conquer it and eliminate all of his enemies, down to the last woman and child. About a week later the warlord went to the city and saw that it was not destroyed and the city gates were wide open. When he entered the city he found the general and his soldiers having a banquet with all of the citizens of that town. The warlord was furious and demanded of the general an explanation of his refusal to carry out his orders. The general responded, “But honored sir, I carried out your orders exactly. As you can see, there are no enemies here, only friends.”
