(James W.)
John 15:9-17
Let us pray.
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, Oh Lord, our strength and our redeemer.
Today’s Gospel reading speaks a good deal about love and how God loves us, how we are to love one another, and how we can do that. Some of Jesus’ teaching about love can seem, on first glance to be a little difficult to understand. But Jesus says some pretty amazing things to us in today’s reading, so it is worth our while to make sense of it all.
One of the wonderful things about following a lectionary is that you get to hear from all parts of the Bible over a three year cycle. One of the weaknesses is that sometimes the individual readings miss out on some important context that helps us understand what is being said. Today’s Gospel reading is one such instance. This passage is best understood if you have read the preceding verses.
When we understand the larger context, then some of the potentially confusing parts in today’s readings make sense. Our reading today is only a smaller part of a larger section in John’s gospel. If you open your Bibles to John chapter 15, v. 1, you will read the opening line of this larger passage. Jesus says “I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener.” Then a few verses later, Jesus continues “Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.” Understanding this vine and branch metaphor is crucial to understanding the passage.
Even though we might not all be gardeners or farmers, we all understand what happens to a branch that is cut off from the vine. The vine gives nourishment and life to its branches. Branches cannot exist independently of the vine. Jesus is telling us that he is like the vine and we are the branches. In order to be productive followers of Jesus, we must remain connected to Jesus Christ and draw our power from him. Just as the branches of a vine cannot bear fruit, or even live, unless they are connected to the vine, so we cannot bear fruit or truly live unless we are connected to Jesus. It would make no sense for a branch to say “I am going to bear some wonderful grapes this year, but before I do that, I will ask the farmer to take his axe and cut me off from the vine.” We all know what happens to a cut off branch – it withers and dies, and most certainly does not produce fruit.
In verse 10 of today’s reading, Jesus says something which might startle us if we didn’t have the vine and branches metaphor already in mind. He says “If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love.” This sounds like quid pro quo – we keep the law and Jesus will love us. But isn’t that antithetical to everything we have been taught about salvation by works? Is Jesus saying here that he will only love us if we follow the law? Isn’t salvation by grace alone? We always like to try to reduce things down to formulas – if we do this, you are obligated to do that. But Jesus is being much more holistic in what he is saying here.
The vine and branches metaphor has just taught us that we can only bear fruit if we are connected to Jesus. In other words, we can only do what Jesus commands if we remain in his love. Disconnect from Jesus and we wither and die. In this way, doing his commands and remaining in his love are two inseparable things. The only way that we can keep his commands is if we are deeply connected to Jesus. Jesus is not presenting to us a contract – if you do x, then I will do y. Rather, he is telling us that if we are his disciples, do the things he would have us do, then it must be that we are deeply connected to him.
Being connected to Jesus is also important to properly understand what Jesus’ commands are. In v. 12, Jesus tells us “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you” and again in v. 17 he repeats “This is my command: Love each other.” Jesus isn’t telling us to love one another with a distorted human perspective on love. He is telling us to love as he loved us. We can only love others the way Jesus loved us if we are deeply connected to Jesus. The sort of human love we see in the world around us is often distorted. As we enter into election season, we will undoubtedly see a lot of manipulative love – love given in hopes of reaping votes or campaign contributions. In many interpersonal relationships we also see manipulative love – wherein one person loves another in order to satiate his or her own personal needs and not those of the other person. We also see manipulative love in advertising. Advertisers pretend to care about you, but are really only interested in what you have in your wallet or bank account.
Our society often also equates love with having no boundaries. We see the concepts of tolerance and hatred set up as polar opposites, when, in reality, tolerance is not really love at all, but simply apathy. If you spend a lot of time cooking for someone and when they finally taste your culinary creation, they tell you “It’s tolerable”, you would likely be quite hurt. There is a vast difference between “it’s tolerable” and “it tastes great”. Tolerance is not love. Love often does have boundaries.
The love that Jesus wants us to have for each other is the love he had for us. Jesus said “Love each other as I have loved you.” And Jesus then tells us how to love each other, and, in so doing, also tells us how he loved us. He says “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Sacrificial love is the kind of love we are called to. This is the kind of love that can cost us everything. Manipulative love has as its basis what the other person can do for you. Tolerance has as its basis apathy towards the other person. But sacrificial love has as its basis the genuine well-being of the other person. Sacrificial love is the kind of love that parents have for their children – the kind of love that we are celebrating today on Mother’s Day.
This is the kind of love that Jesus had for us. “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” We know that, on the cross, Jesus laid down his life for us, taking our sin upon himself. But listen to what Jesus tells us next “You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because servants do not know their master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends.” We are Jesus’ friends, and he laid down his life for us.
Jesus commands us to love one another with sacrificial love, just as he loved us. Jesus says, in v. 16 “you did not choose me, but I chose you”. Jesus chose us, we did not choose him. Think about that for a minute. We are called to love one another as Jesus loved us, and we know that Jesus loved us FIRST! What does this mean? It means that we aren’t just called to love those who love us already, those people we hang around with. In Matthew 5:46-47, Jesus says” If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?” We need to be proactive at seeking out those to love, and then loving them with the sacrificial love of God. This means looking out and loving those people that the world thinks are unlovable, but not for manipulative purposes, nor to easily and apathetically tell them they are okay, but to really love them sacrificially.
Doing this isn’t easy, and it can only be done if we remain deeply connected with Jesus, as a branch is connected to the vine. Barbara and I are taking a class at a local Presbyterian church near where we live called “Life Together”. This class is intended to make us better disciples of Jesus as we examine what it means to live as a community of Christians in this world. One of the things that the pastor and our readings have emphasized is that you can’t just go and do the hard things Jesus has commanded us to do without training to do them, because we will inevitably fail. If somebody decides to run a marathon, they don’t just begin running 26 miles on the spur of the moment. They will fail. They need to engage in a disciplined training regimine, and only after completing that, will they be able to complete the marathon.
Same thing with loving others in the way that Jesus loved us. We can’t expect to just be able to do this on our own. We need to follow a disciplined training regimine with Jesus at its core. We need to spend serious time in the Scriptures, reading the stories of how God has interacted with his people. We need to spend serious time in prayer, listening to God, and putting our heart right with God. We need to be connected to other Christians. In his book Life Together, on page 32, the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer had this to say about Christian community:
Christian community means community through and in Jesus Christ.We need to be part of a loving community in order for us to love others. Our society is an individualistic one and we often think “there are no churches that we really fit in to. We will just be Christian on our own.” But the church is the body of Christ, and we can’t be part of Christ if we aren’t part of his body. There are other spiritual disciplines that would be profitable for us to follow also, but these are the major ones.
Christians need other Christians who speak God’s Word to them. They need them again and again when they become uncertain and disheartened because, living by their own resources, they cannot help themselves without cheating themselves out of the truth. They need other Christians as bearers and proclaimers of the divine word of salvation. They need them solely for the sake of Jesus Christ.
If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian community in which we have been placed, even when there are no great experiences, no noticeable riches, but much weakness, difficulty, and little faith—and if, on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so miserable and so insignificant and does not at all live up to our expectations—then we hinder God from letting our community grow according to the measure and riches that are there for us all in Jesus Christ.
Our second reading from the first letter of John also speaks of how loving others is the command of God. John says: “This is how we know that we love the children of God: by loving God and carrying out his commands. In fact, this is love for God: to keep his commands. And his commands are not burdensome, for everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world? Only the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.”
Our world is full of sin and death, but sin and death are not the last word. The last word is God’s sacrificial love for us – he gave his life for us, and he now calls us to love others with his sacrificial love. This is the victory that will overcome the world. Let us be Jesus’ friends, follow his commands, and stay rooted in him like a branch is to the vine.
Let us pray:
O Lord, let us remain deeply rooted in you so that you can sustain our faith and that we can bear lasting fruit in your name. We pray that you give us a desire for your Word, intimacy with you in prayer, and joy in our brothers and sisters in Christ. We ask this all in your holy name. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment