Love One Another

John 15:9-13

⁹As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. ¹⁰If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. ¹¹I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.

¹²“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. ¹³No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.    ---John 15:9-13

            This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.

Our text from John is one of a cluster of texts we find in the Bible in which the totality of faith and religious obligation is summarized in a singular, simple, short statement.  Such short texts seek to crystallize in a few words that which is otherwise inexplicable and beyond many words:  what is the life of faith in God all about.

            Isaiah 58 casts the heart of religious faith in terms of service to others. What is true worship?  God asks, before answering his own question, asking rhetorically, “Does not true worship come in sharing your bread with the hungry and bringing the homeless poor into your house, giving cover to the naked?” 

            In the gospel of John, Jesus presents the essence of religious faith in terms of love, when he commands his disciples to “love one another as I have loved you.”

            Are these two texts each talking about different forms of faith?  Or, are both of them expressing what faith is all about in differing images and language?  Perhaps more to the point for Christians, is Jesus introducing a new form of faith when he calls his disciples to love one another?

            I think Jesus is presenting his own Hebrew faith to his followers in a way that cuts right to the chase, in language that sums up what faith in the God of Israel has always been about:  love.

            Now, the love of which Jesus speaks is not merely emotional attachment, even though there is no denying the emotional energy of love.  Jesus is calling for more than affection. In calling his followers to love one another, Jesus is calling his followers to actively build up one another in every dimension of our lives.  The love of which Jesus speaks is a giving of oneself for the purpose of nurturing and building up another person. (cf Scott Peck).  Love is responding to the needs of another in a way that leads to growth and wholeness in that person.  Love literally brings life to those whom we love.

            Jesus commands love be a feature of the Christian community.  Love one another, he says.  Care for one another.  Comfort one another.  Support one another.  Protect one another.  Love one another.

            But the command to love one another is not limited to those inside the Christian community of the Church.  Christian love drives us to bring protection and comfort and support and justice to all of God’s children.  God’s love – and the love Christ calls us to exhibit – does not distinguish between those inside and outside of the Christian community.  For by God’s love, all of God’s children are transformed into brothers and sisters, neighbors one of another.

            Such love is life changing love.  Such love is world changing love. For in such love as Christ has for us and we share with one another, is the power to overcome all human brokenness and despair.  Such love brings comfort to the grieving and compassion to those in need.  In such love is the hope that God’s kingdom will indeed come, here on earth, as it is in heaven.

            For, as Paul wrote, love never fails.  And love never ends.  Which is the greatest and deepest hope of all.  If love never ends, we can never be separated from those whom we love. If love never ends, we have the comfort and assurance, that nothing can separate us from those whom we love or from the God who loves us.  Not disease.  Not even death.  God’s love never fails and God’s love never ends.  Which means that nothing, nothing in all of creation, is able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

            Friends:  love one another, as Christ has loved you.  Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly…you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and God will say, “Here I am.”  (Isa 58) Now, by God’s grace and love, let us take comfort from these words.  AMEN.

R. Charles Grant

Bon Air Presbyterian Church

Richmond, Virginia

July 14, 2007