Year B

John 15:9-17

The Rev. Denise Vaughn

No Greater Love

Charles Dickens classic story, A Tale of Two Cities, is a story of two friends, Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton. Darnay a young Frenchman with a wife and family is thrown into a dungeon and faces the guillotine. Carton, a wasted lawyer, is finishing his life as a loose-living individual in England. Carton hears of Darnay’s imprisonment and through a chain of events gets into the dungeon and changes garments with Darnay. He then sets it up for Darnay to be carried out of the prison so he can ultimately escape. The next morning Sydney Carton makes his way up the steps that lead to the guillotine where only one woman recognizes who he really is.  This abridged version of that crucial part of the story illustrates the point that Dickens wanted to make; “Greater love has no man than this; that he lay down his life for his friend.”

Dickens obviously knew the roots of that story. He drew that illustration from the words of Jesus himself in the passage from the gospel for today. “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” This is what Jesus did for us. What amazing love! Throughout the Easter season, the central message of the scriptures is the proclamation of love. We hear John tell us that God is love, that God loves us and showed his love for us in Jesus, an awesome love that if possible, we need to understand before we can respond with love for God and love for neighbor. We see this love in Jesus who gave his life on our behalf and we show our grateful love for God only as we show our love toward one another. But just maybe we have become too familiar with this idea that we need to realize again just what an astonishing idea of God this is.

The late Peter Scholtes a priest and an author, in 1966 wrote the hymn, “They’ll know we are Christians by our love….yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love. He composed this hymn which you may be familiar with, especially if you have been to Cursillo, at the height of one of the most tumultuous periods of U.S. history and it is now sung world-wide. He set the lyrics to music in less than half a day, because he was so moved by Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson and others that were involved in the civil rights movement. He was a white priest leading a half-Irish, half black parish on the south side of Chicago where he came to understand that love was not just a romantic notion but an action.

He showed that love in action by hanging a sign outside the church welcoming King on his first trip to Chicago. King traveling by the church saw the sign and went in. Scholtes offered him a cup of coffee and took him to the church basement where parish women were feeding the hungry and thirsty with tangible signs of God’s love. As a priest, I’m sure he was familiar with these words in the epistle today from 1 John.  The message and mandate of 1 John to “love the children of God” as they love the parent echoes throughout his hymn. In these verses, John mentions ‘Love’ at least four times and the key to his message is: those who come from God, love God and love others in God’s name, not in word or speech only, but in deed and in truth.

They will know us by our love, binding together faith in Jesus, love of God, love of one another, and obedience to God. Jesus tells us today that “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”  Our ability to love one another is certainly the fruit of the love of Jesus poured out for us, but the ultimate test is our love for one another. Taking a good look at our world, perhaps we are too familiar with this mandate and tend to sentimentalize this love and forget that when things seem to be going all right for us, this is not the case for everyone, and at times in our lives it will not be the case for us.

Just think of how the vast majority of our planet’s inhabitants experience life: inescapable poverty, high infant mortality, recurrent famine, natural disasters, and deadly wars. Even in affluent Europe and North America, how few think of life as happy. To quote a best selling self-help book: “Life is difficult.” So to proclaim that God is love goes against our common experience. We ask; where is this God of love in the difficult life? We proclaim that God loves God’s creation and that we are to be bearers of this truth that God is for us, God is with us, God cares for us and yes, God loves us. Yet, we ask understandably, if God is love, than why so much suffering and unloving people and actions. We want God to intervene and help and God does. Yet, God did not even spare his own Son’s suffering, a suffering that showed this awesome love and brought healing salvation. God’s ways are not our ways, says the Lord. Jesus rose again to show that nothing, not even death, can extinguish this love and if it wasn’t for Christ, the gospel would be folly. For in Christ, God brought divine love to our common experience.

This is our hope, our calling and our mission because you see, to get involved with God makes a claim on our lives. To get involved with God we have to become vulnerable to God and to each other. Our mission is to lift up this vulnerable love as the key to life revealed in Jesus and to see all love for anyone or anything as the love of God, reflecting that love to the world. How will anyone believe this love unless they see it in us, in the church? How will anyone be convinced that beneath the pain and difficulty of life flows this divine love, unless we live that way, as difficult as that can be sometimes? To help us live with this kind of love, Jesus tells us we have to abide in his love and stay connected to the vine. “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.” “So that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.” This divine joy that Christ gives to his followers is a most precious gift and is the key to living that divine love and the good news for us.

Writer and poet, Gilbert Chesterton called the joy we experience in Christ “the gigantic secret of the Christian.” Jesus saw the keeping of God’s commandments as a joy, a fulfillment within God’s purposes. The primary reason for the joy we find in keeping the commandments is the fact that the basic underlying commandment is love. “I am giving you these commands so that you can love one another” Jesus says, in the same way I love you. Then your joy will be complete. This joy is ours to give to a world that is full of hatred, illness and sorrow. This is a love that strengthens the heart for those things that must be done. When God’s love lives in our hearts, we can live the command Jesus gives us. We can love one another and others because God has loved us. They will know us by our love and there is no greater love than this, but we can only love in this way if we love God first. May we love because God first loved us. May we then boldly love each other by that grace.