Easter Five - Love One Another as I have Loved You

We have some incredibly encouraging and challenging readings this week (Easter Five. Acts 11:1-18; Psalm 148; Revelation 21:1-6; and John 13:31-35.) So many beautiful and quite radical images that we need to hold together and invite to illumine our life and faith. And love – of course – is the centrepiece, the fulcrum, the promise and the task!

I encourage you to read what I wrote three years ago that explores the texts.

What God has made is Clean

Given the state of the world, the church, and my life I feel the need to explore the commandment to love as Jesus loved within the context, or between the bookends, of the insight of Peter’s vision of all things being of God, and the shining image and hope in Revelation of a new heaven and earth!

You and I and all others live in a world both as perfectly beautiful as Psalm 148 gives voice to and the Revelation of John perceives will be again and even more so in the fullness of time. We also live in a world as glimpsed in a vision by Peter in which those things we label as profane are of God and belong. We also know that this same world and us are in a mess of fragility and fracture, being harmed and doing harm, forgetting who we truly are and whose we are.

We know, or at least accept, that the love of God as expressed in and through Jesus the Christ, is the answer, the path, the unmerited gift, and the task given to the disciples before Jesus went to his ultimate act of love – his death and resurrection. I think that we are being challenged to hold the holy tension between the central truth that the love of Jesus was and is freely given and that we are told that we are to love in this same way! Some say that we cannot love others until we have experienced this undeserved love from Jesus. Others say that it is in loving others that we become aware of and open to the love of God through Jesus. However, as I have several times suggested, I believe that it is holding the two – the gift and the task – that we are healed and begin to grow.

So, if we are to love one another as Jesus loved us then what are the qualities of that love? And how, if at all, are some of those qualities different to what we might expect? Hint – I don’t perceive the love of Jesus only being soft and gentle, meek and mild! Just as might imagine that the gaze of Jesus is piercing so to the love of Jesus penetrates through and beyond the surface layer of things and reveals what needs healing, forgiving and realizing.

Staying close to the gospel of John and the season of Easter let us explore some of the qualities of God’s love for us made known through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. Knowing that these qualities are the way in which we are to love one another. This is not an exhaustive list of qualities but some of those we have recently heard and seen.

Jesus loved and loves as one who accepts and responds to our deepest desires and efforts to love. We think of Mary (John 12:1-8) who anoints his feet with costly nard and the acceptance and gratitude with which Jesus receives her gift. Indeed he honours and protects her from the criticism of others. The love of Jesus is a dance, a circular flow of energy, that does not simply pour out in one direction but engages us and delights in our feeble but best intended gifts.

Jesus loved and loves as one who declares who and what he is, and is not, yet allows us to place our expectations on him. And then steps to the side requiring us to decide and act. Think of Jesus entering into Jerusalem on a donkey surrounded by waving palms declaring who and what he was (John 12:12-19) yet allowing those who gathered to pour their hopes and dreams on him. And then Jesus takes a sidestep when asked if he is king requiring Pilate and we to decide who and what he is? (John 18:33-37) Jesus wears our projections and then mirrors in love what we need to learn.

Jesus loved and loves us as one who serves us and calls us friends. As teacher and master Jesus knelt and served and called his followers friends – a reversal of how things were understood. And so we too are to love – serving, treating as beloved friends, not as the world understands importance but as love beckons. (John 13:1-20)

Jesus loved and loves us even from the cross. Suffocating under the weight of his own body and the weight of all that was wrong and broken about the human condition Jesus loved to the end with his last concerns being for the future care of others, in particular his mother and beloved disciple. He spent his last energy loving and fulfilling the role of the suffering servant, not cursing those who were cruel to him but loving those who feared him, those who failed him, those powerless to help. (John 19:25-30)

And Jesus continued to love beyond the realm of the tomb as he moved among the terrified and broken hearted disciples. Maybe most beautifully seen at the lakeside beach where Jesus makes himself known to Peter, who had denied him three times, and three times invites him to declare his love and grow in his capacity to love Jesus and others. (John 21:1-19) Maybe more clearly here than anywhere else we see what it means to love one another as Jesus loves us as Peter is forgiven and healed, strengthened and reinforced, so that he is not only restored but that he is prepared and refined for his work of loving others as he was loved.

And surely this is our call too. To be healed and restored, forgiven and built up, initiated and equipped, so that we can love others and go where love will take us. The call to love as Jesus did is not a requirement to be meek and mild necessarily – although gentleness and tenderness are often what is needed – but the call to grow into maturity of faith through the rigors of loving in hard places and allowing what is most shameful in ourselves to be loved into wholeness. It is a journey that requires surrender and courage, imagination and blind faith, tenacity and a certain vulnerable openness. The love of Jesus satisfies every need and will cost us everything.

Even so, come Lord Jesus the Christ, come love us into our fullness so that we can empty ourselves in the work of love.

This is my work informed by everything I have heard, read and experienced. I am indebted to the wisdom of others.

For those who would like to go further into the nuanced work of love I suggest a listen to the turning to the mystics podcasts with James Finley, especially interview 4 on love.

https://cac.org/podcast/turning-to-the-mystics/