This morning,
in the passage from John we read, we jump back in time, to before the
crucifixion, before the weeping and wailing, before the disciples disappeared
on Calvary like so much Hebrew smoke . . . they’re gathered in an upper room,
lamp-light low, digesting their food, maybe picking a bit of it out of their
teeth, and suddenly Jesus says “one of you will betray me . . .” and after
good, old, impulsive Peter gets the disciple whom Jesus loved to ask who is
going to do it—maybe he was tired of getting rebuked, of being made an object
lesson—after the disciple whom Jesus loved popped the question, he says “the
one to whom I give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish.” And
he dips the bread in the dish, hands it to Judas Iscariot, who practically
knocks over the table getting out of there.
And that’s
where today’s passage begins, right after he leaves. And as usual in the gospels, what comes
before any given passage colors its interpretation—or at least it should—and
this is no exception. And so what we
have here is the aftermath of Judas’ betrayal—or at least of Judas’ dramatic
exit to do the deed, and the first thing Jesus says is “Now the Son of Man has
been glorified, and God has been glorified in him.” Notice the past tense: when Judas got up from
that table, after John says Satan came into him, the die was cast. Things were set in motion, it was all over
but the shoutin’. Now the Son of Man has
been glorified—and by “glorified” he means crucified, hung up to die on a
tree—now the Son of Man has been crucified, and God has been crucified in him.
Oops … did I
say “God has been crucified?” Well …
yes. It was God in Christ who was
murdered, who was killed … if as the doctrine of the Trinity says the work of
the father is the work of the son is the work of the Holy Spirit—it was indeed
God who was crucified there with the Son . . .
Anyway, Jesus
has been glorified, God has been glorified, and not a soul around the table
knows what he is talking about. But he plows
right ahead anyway, they’ll understand some day, and he tells them “Little
children: I am with you only a little
longer, and you will look for me, but you will not find me, because where I go,
you cannot come.” And then he launches
into one of the most famous sayings in the bible: “I give you a new
commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also
should love one another.” And it is
almost as if one causes the other, as if Judas’ leaving prompted the new
commandment . . .you shall love one another as I have loved you. And how has
Jesus loved them? What is the exemplar
of that love? Well, it is seen in the
fact that the Son of Man has been glorified.
How is it that
Christ has loved them? By dying for
them, by being spiked to that Golgotha tree.
And Jesus commands us to love one another the very same way: and that is that we lay down our lives one for
another. And in fact, he says, that will be the mark of my disciples:
that they show this love for one another.
I wonder how often we think about that
when we sing that song . . . they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our
love, yes they’ll know we are Christians by our love . . .
But if the
song doesn’t quite do justice to the extent of that love, it also doesn’t quite
cut it in another way: the song defines the boundaries of that love very
broadly. Or rather, it doesn’t give
any. It just says they’ll know we are
Christians by our love … period. No qualifiers.
But in this passage, Jesus defines it as “love for one another,” for other
disciples. This is not quite the broad
mandate it seems: Jesus’ mandate is for
Christians to love one another, to be “glorified,” to lay down their lives for
one another, not necessarily for anyone else.
In this passage, Jesus lays down a community
law, a rule for being a Christian family, for being—as Paul would put it—the
body of Christ. Christians are to be a
body bound together by love.
Saint Benedict
of Nursia knew this. He spent a whole
lot of time as abbot at a monastery in Subiaco that had, shall we say, a small problem with this concept of loving one
another. He’d lived a solitary few years
in a cave in the cliff just below that monastery, and he’d gotten to know the
monks, and they’d gotten to know him—I guess maybe they borrowed sugar from each
other or something—and the monks had come to believe he was a stand up guy, so
when their Abbot passed away they asked Benedict to take his place. And he did.
He became their leader, but it wasn’t long before he discovered that
they didn’t exactly live the love command, and what might have clued him in was
the fact that they tried to poison him.
Maybe their copy of John didn’t have that part, or maybe they just got
it backwards, and were trying to make Benedict give up his life for theirs, but
the fact was they tried to kill him.
Now, I don’t
know for sure, but this seems to have had an effect upon Benedict, so much so
that he began thinking about what it meant to live in community, what it meant
to love one another as Christ loves us, and eventually—after having founded and
led thirteen monasteries—he began to write his rulebook on how to live in
Christian community, and it was so well-thought-out, so balanced, that eventually
the majority of monastic orders adopted it, whether they called themselves
“Benedictine” or not.
And in the
prologue to that Rule, he describes the monastic life as running “the way of
God's commandments with expanded hearts and unspeakable sweetness of love,” and
the first and second “instruments of good works,” the bases for doing the work
of God, are loving the Lord God “with the whole heart, the whole soul, the
whole strength... and then, one's neighbor as one's self.”
But the
foundation of the Rule, and thus the foundation of monastic life, is not love,
but rather obedience … obedience to God’s commands. The very first sentence of the Rule goes like
this: “Listen, O my child, to the precepts of thy master, and incline the ear
of thy heart, and cheerfully receive and faithfully execute the admonitions of
thy loving Father . . .” All the
commandments in the world, whether they be new commands or old, don’t amount to
a hill of beans if they are not followed, if they go in one ear and out the
other. Listen, Benedict says, don’t just
hear the words of the master, but truly listen,
with your whole heart, with your whole self . . . he uses intense imagery,
designed to catch hold of the reader, to make her sit up and take heed: incline
the ear of your heart. He knew—as did
the ancients and those who've been on my current Adult Ed class—that the heart
is an organ of perception, and what he is saying is listen with your whole
self, your body, mind and heart. Lean your whole being, your entire psyche,
into the precepts of God.
And
Benedictine monks spend a lot of time listening to the commands of God … their
day is balanced between work, prayer and study . . . and the study is intense
meditation upon the Word—what we call lectio divina, divine reading—and as
they immerse themselves in God’s word for hours each day, they surely do
incline themselves toward God’s will, they lean into it and reorient themselves
to God’s precepts and will like a plant bends itself to grow into the sunlight.
Well. This sermon certainly has bent itself to go
in a direction I hadn’t planned … I thought I’d talk about the love Jesus
prescribes in this passage of John, circumscribed by the bounds of community,
and then how it is expanded first by Jesus himself—love thy neighbor as
thyself—and then by God in the tableau presented to Peter in the passage from
Acts that Jim read: all things are clean and, thus all people as well. All people are to be loved, all our
neighbors. It started out being an ebony
and ivory, we are the world kind of thing, and it ended up as … what? A treatise on obedience? On listening for God’s word?
Sometimes it
happens like that . . . sometimes the Spirit—or at least I hope that’s who it is—leads us to where we least expect. And the upshot of this leading, I think, is
the thought that all the scripture passages I and our liturgists stand up here
and read week after week, and all the interpretations I might give, however
cogent and to the point, will do no good if we—and I include myself here
intentionally, you’d be surprised how easy it is to not really listen to a
passage you’re preaching on—they will do no good if we don’t really listen to God’s word, if we do not
incline our hearts and minds and souls
to it. The word of God does no good if
we don’t hear it in the fundamental deep sense Benedict is talking about, and
then as he puts it, faithfully execute it.
If we do not hear and do God’s word, how are we a community of God? How are we different from anyone else?
Over the past
few years, we’ve been engaged in such a listening activity, such a discernment
task … we’ve been listening to God’s will, trying to figure out what it meant
for us. One of the things we've felt
called to do is reorganize so as to more efficiently operate as a church, and as
our Transformation 2.0 process winds down, we are talking with community
leaders about increasing our involvement with local issues.
But with all
this comes a particular nervousness, a lot of tension as we try to come to
grips with change that is happening.
People worry about the future, and the uncertainty can combine with the
nervousness to blunt the mission of God.
But through it all, as the song says, they will know we are Christians
by our love, and we’re not just asked to
love one another, to let love overcome our fear, our tensions, our nervousness,
but commanded to do so. We are
commanded in today’s passage to love one another as Jesus loved us.
But these
commandments, embodied in our Word from God—who is Jesus the Christ—do no good
if we do not listen to them with the ears of our hearts and then execute them. They do us no good—and they are given to us for our own good—unless we obey. I say these things in the name of God the one
who Creates us anew, every day, and God the one who redeems us, and God the one
who comforts us and teaches how to pray, Amen.
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