Love
and Revelation
Texts: Acts 10.44-48; 1 John 5.1-6; John 15.9-17
This morning I want to lead you in a brief meditation about love.
‘Love’ is a word that has almost come to grief in our modern
world. Used so often, and by so many different interests and
agendas, it is in danger of becoming empty: no more than a vacuous
vessel into which both speaker and spoken-to may pour any kind of
meaning they like.
Depending on the context, love turns out to mean so many things.
In Hollywood, love is a feeling of euphoria, a chemistry between people
which (like the weather) can come and go. While that euphoria is
around, life is great. But when it departs, there is no longer
any reason to persevere with a relationship.
In some sections of the Australian military, love seems to mean being
willing to stick by your mates even if your mates are using and abusing
you. Love means keeping silence while your ‘mates’ do with you as
they will, remaining loyal to people who actually hate you.
In the middle-class suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, love so often
means no more than ‘being nice’, that is, keeping up the appearance
that we all get on with each other (even though we don’t), pretending
that we have a common view of the world (when actually we don’t).
Love, in this context, means to avoid talking about anything that may
raise our passions, for fear that the other person’s passions may come
back at us in an unpleasant way. Love as the avoidance of
difference, or conflict, or strong emotions, or the possibility of
working toward a common truth. Love is being polite, even to the
point of living a lie.
The Christian meaning of love is rather different. Christians are
not bound to love after the manner of our many secular religions.
Christians have been freed to love in a very particular way: the way of
Jesus, the Son of God. Where the secular versions of love are as
manipulable and as whimsical as the many contexts in which they appear,
the love of Christ has a strong and consistent content in any place or
time. Why? Because love, in the Christian lexicon, is not
something we may define and embody for ourselves. It is a way of
life that comes from beyond us, from the God whose very being is
love. It is a way of life that is nevertheless available to us in
our human bodies and cultures by the action of the Spirit, who
permeates and suffuses the Christian community in exactly the same way
and she permeated the life of Jesus, the Son of God, when he lived and
died amongst us more that 2000 years ago. The meaning of
Christian love is therefore tied, not to the constantly shifting
fashions and fabrics of human culture, but to the embodied story and
character of a particular man: Jesus, the Son of God.
John the Evangelist has Jesus say this, and I quote:
As the Father has loved me, so I have
loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you
will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and
abide in his love . . . This is my commandment, that you love one
another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than
this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my
friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you slaves
any longer, because the slave does not know what the master is
doing. Instead, I have called you friends, because I have made
known to you everything that I have learned from my Father.
I want to make just three observations about this extraordinary
passage. First, that the love of which Christ speaks does not
wait for human context or culture to fill it with meaning. No,
the meaning of this love is clear: it is an imitation of Christ’s
radical form of friendship, the willingness to lay aside one’s own life
in order that another’s life may flourish. It is, in the words of
Paul Ricoeur, the apprehension that the other person has a claim on me,
and that I am no longer responsible only for myself, but that I share
in the responsibility to insure that the life of my brother or sister
is able to flourish as well, to become what God intends that it may
become.
A second point now. The language of laying down one’s life
refers, of course, to a particular history: the real event of
Christ’s crucifixion. It should be remembered, however, that the
crucifixion represents not just the love of a singular man at a
particular time, for a particular community. The crucifixion is a
sign in the world of the love of God the Father, God the Son, and God
the Holy Spirit for every single creature, in every time and
place. The cross enacts in human history what God has been like,
and will be like for eternity: love. The love of the Father
for the Son, and the Son for the Father; the love that is able to
welcome and cede its place for the sake of the other; the love that is
willing to lose that another may win; the love that able to long for
another’s flourishing and give that longing both form and body.
All that Christ did in the world, he learned from his Father. Now
the Father and the Son have come to us anew in the Spirit, that the
love which properly belongs to the Father and the Son may be spread
abroad in our own, oh-so-human cultures, relationships and bodies.
A final observation. The love of God, as I have been saying, is
not without. It has form and shape and a particular history in
the world. And that is really what the language of ‘commandment’
is about, in this passage. We are commanded to love not because
God is a bully and we are his slaves. On the contrary, as Jesus
says here, we are no longer slaves but friends; but this is only the
case insofar as we are willing to love. The command to love, you
see, is also (and somewhat paradoxically) the means by which God frees
us from our bondage to self. If we did not love, we would still
be slaves to all that our selves are apart from Christ—a series of
basic, and seemingly irresistible, drives derived from DNA, from
family, from our peer environment, or where-ever. In love,
however, we learn to listen for another voice. The voice of God,
who alone knows how it is that human beings may flourish. The
command to love is therefore, in its most basic form, an apprehension
of the pressure God exerts towards our freedom, our liberation towards
life not only for ourselves, but for the people around us as
well. The command to love reminds us that love cannot be what we
want it to be. Love can only be what God is.
So then, let us love one another. Not after the manner of fashion
or convenience, but after the costly manner of God in Christ. Let
us love one another as if we had a claim on each other. Let us
love as though nothing else really mattered. And whatever we do,
let us not turn love into that kind of law that is unable to forgive
and set free. For the love of God is the capacity to forgive most
of all. Let us therefore love and forgive each other from the
heart, just as in Christ God has loved and forgiven us.
In the name of our loving God—Father, Son & Holy Spirit—as in the
beginning, so now, a for ever, world without end. Amen.
Garry
J. Deverell
Easter 6, 2006
back to homily
index