5 May 2024 Easter 6

Acts 10.44-48;  Psalm 98;  1 John 5.1-12;  John 15.9-17

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.  Nice.  We have heard it many times, but the thing is, can we really be ‘ordered’ to love.  Is love something that you can be commanded to do.  Think about when you were raising you children, you may have wanted them to love each other, but could you really ‘order’ them to love.  No.  The best you could do is ask them, or even order them, to act as if  they loved each other.  And often, their acting would have been done through gritted teeth, or with ‘crossed fingers’, or with ‘daggered looks’, because love is either ‘genuine’ or it is not really love.

And when Jesus gives the disciples this ‘commandment’ he asks for ‘genuine’ love, not ‘half-hearted’ ‘forced’ love.  There are no short cuts in this, love ‘as I have loved you’.  Jesus is asking for the ‘real deal’, the authentic feeling, and honest engagement.  But really, is it too much?  Can we really love ‘as God loves us’.  G. K. Chesterton once wrote ‘the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting.  It has been found difficult and left untried’.  Think about it.  What would the world look like if we took this commandment seriously.  What would Christendom look like if we obeyed this commandment and cultivated this ‘impossible’ love?

And this is a difficult question to answer.  Many of us know how to ‘do’ things, we know how to offer to care for people, we know how to give to the ‘charities’ around us, we know how to ‘bring food’ when something is happening or someone is in need.  But do we really know how to love as Jesus loved.  Do we really know how to feel a depth of compassion that is ‘gut-wrenching’, or pursue justice with such passion and urgency that we are willing to rearrange our entire lives to achieve it.  Do we know how to empathise until our heart breaks?  And, to be honest, do we want to?

And, most of the time, our answer is probably, again, no.  We want to remain safe, we want to keep our lives predictable and organised.  We ‘choose’ the people we love based on our own preferences, not on Jesus’ all-inclusive commandment.  It is easy to be charitable.  But cultivating our heart, preparing and pruning it to love, becoming authentically vulnerable to the world’s pain?  That is hard, and it is costly.

So, what can we do, where do we begin.  Well, Jesus offers us a single, straight-forward answer.  ‘Abide in my love’.  In our reading today, Jesus extends the metaphor of the vine and branches and again invites us to ‘abide’ in his love.  To make ourselves at home, to rest and cling, not just in him, but ‘’in his love’.

And the thing about abiding is, it is not the same as emulating.  We are not asked to treat Jesus as our role model, which frankly, we can never live up to.  When Jesus uses this vine and branches metaphor, he is not saying Jesus’ love is our example, he is saying it is our source.  It is where our love originates and deepens.  It is where it replenishes itself.  In other words, if we do not abide, we can not love.  Jesus is not commanding us to ‘rely on our own resources’ to conjure up our love.  He is telling us to abide in the holy place where human love becomes possible.  He is inviting us to make our home in Jesus’ love – the most abundant and inexhaustible love in existence.

And when we do that, we immediately find ourselves caught in a paradox.  We are called to action via rest.  We are called to become love as we abide in love.  The invitation is to drink our fill of the Source, which is Christ, spill over to bless the world, and then return to the Source to fill up again.  And we keeping doing this over and over again.  This is where we begin and end and begin again.

Now this passage is toward the end of what we know as Jesus’ ‘farewell discourse’.  For the last few chapters and the one after this, Jesus is ‘preparing’ the disciples for what is about to occur.  His arrest, trial, crucifixion and death.  He is telling them they will survive this horror, they can continue, there is a ‘next page’ in this story, and they need to turn the page and be part of it.  Jesus is telling them his love for them is so deep that he is willing to ‘give up’ his life for them, and for us.  And Jesus is reminding them that, despite what they may think, and despite what we sometimes think, they, we, did not choose Jesus, he chose them, he chose me, and you, and the rest of us.  And this matters, because, if it were up to us to choose Jesus, to abide in him, to obey Jesus’ commandments, to love as he loves, then we would be lost.  We simply cannot do it.  We may try, and try valiantly, but when push comes to shove, we will come up short.

But, as we see in this passage, God loves us, has chosen us, and will use us, to make this world a better place.  And when we look at the global situation we find ourselves in, this is very good news, even if it is hard to remember.  God gives us the courage to face what the world throws at us, and God renews our strength to do something about it all.   We cannot fix the world, that is God’s work, but knowing that God has promised to do so can provide us with the strength and energy to work toward making our own little corner of the world a better place to be in.

Love one another as I have loved you

Abide in my love

And these are not two separate actions.  They are one and the same.  One ‘impossible’ commandment to save the world.