Year C
John 13:31-35
The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn
Love Wins
The late Mother Teresa once said: “Joy is prayer-Joy is strength-joy is love-joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls. She gives most who gives with joy. The best way to show our gratitude to God and the people is to accept everything with joy. A joyful heart is the inevitable result of a heart burning with love. We all long for heaven where God is, but we have it in our power to be in heaven with Him right now-to be happy with Him at this very moment. But being happy with Him means loving as He loves, helping as He helps, giving as He gives, serving as He serves, rescuing as He rescues, being with Him for all the twenty-four hours, touching Him in His distressing disguise.”
Beautiful words said by a woman I truly admire who lived her life as an example of love. She showed us a life well lived and it was not an easy life. Her life was not one most of us would aspire to live, although we should, but it was one that was filled with the joy of the Lord and this kind of life is a life filled with love which sums up the texts today on this Fifth Sunday of Easter. God gives us another standard by which our lives are to be measured. That measure is God’s equal love for all people. Peter learned this in his vision and encounter with Cornelius which comforted the suffering community during their time of trial and allowed the Gentiles in. Jesus demonstrated this by washing the feet of his disciples and establishing his self-giving, sacrificial love as a model for them to follow.
Therefore, it would be difficult to overestimate the importance of today’s texts in Christian thought especially the John passage. The love command that Jesus gives to his disciples is understood as both the center of Jesus’ teaching and the center of the Christian life. And because of this passage, which recalls a moment prior to the crucifixion in the upper room at their Last Supper together, Christian Ethics is most often described as a love ethic. Judas had gone out, and Jesus knows what this means. However, he also knows the disciples are not going to understand the implications of what has just happened and what is about to happen. This is his last opportunity for him to say what he wants to say to them before his death.
He speaks to them with an intimacy that would convey the importance of this moment in his life, a moment he hoped they would remember for the rest of their lives and I’m very sure they did. He begins to prepare them for his death by speaking of the glorification of himself through his death and that the Father would be glorified through the Son’s obedience. The Father’s plan was being carried out, reflecting God’s great love for the world. When the Father is glorified, the honor will reflect back upon Jesus, giving glory to the very cross upon which he would be crucified. Not waiting for his disciples to understand or question him, Jesus goes on to speak about the new commandment that he leaves with them and all who would follow him.
He gives as the model, himself, by which one is to live well with joy in relationship with God and humanity. Demonstrating this love in his life and death given on behalf of one’s friends and He says, by this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. Now there are four different words in the Greek language for love. Jesus uses agape, generally considered the most divine, selfless love. But in Aramaic, a language related to Hebrew, of which Jesus would have actually used, love is not just a feeling—it is an action. You demonstrate love by what you do, not what you say, nor how you feel. And what Jesus did was wash his disciple’s feet then give his life on the cross. They are to do whatever it takes, no matter how menial or undignified, to demonstrate their love. This is supposed to be our distinguishing mark and love does win to catch souls.
This self-sacrificing love, Paul lifts up in his letters, as he exhorts his fellow Christians to follow the lead of Christ in their relationships with one another. To understand the context of the text from Acts today, we must begin by recognizing that Jerusalem was the headquarters of the early church. That’s where the apostles were, that’s where the decisions were made and where the authority of the early church resided. The issue at hand was the phenomenon of Gentile Christians. It had only been a decade since the ascension of Jesus so the Gentile Christian was still a brand-new situation and the church was uncertain what to do about it. It all boiled down to namely this: if the Jewish law which required circumcision as God’s will for holy living, then are not all Christians obligated to obey it?
No issue was more hotly debated than whether their newfound faith was intended only for Jews or whether it was to include Gentiles. Peter seeks to justify to the “circumcised party” in Jerusalem his having eaten with and accepted the hospitality of a gentile, the Roman Centurion Cornelius and his family in Caesarea. In Peter’s visit to Cornelius, love is not so much a feeling that binds Peter and the new Gentile converts, but the act of obedience in which Peter recognizes Cornelius and his household as his baptized brothers and sisters in Christ, without respect of race. The leaders in Jerusalem listened and were open to the new reality Peter envisioned. The rest is history as we like to say and that’s the way love wins.
This love wins in the book of Revelation. God is with us, at the beginning, and at the end. The New Jerusalem comes down as a bride for her husband, uniting God and God’s people, with God healing all their hurts, as a sign that love wins! John, who has witnessed the victory of God and the hosts of heaven over the forces of darkness, heard the praises of God and of the Lamb, is now treated to a glimpse of what God is shaping for the epilogue to history. There will be a new heaven, a new earth, a new Jerusalem, a new everything – what joy there shall be for the people of God in this new creation.
What love God has, and will show for us. We will live with God-a life that is filled with relationships of joy and strength and love with all God’s people. In the meantime, let us turn around and apply this same love to all we meet. When we allow the love of Christ to take deep root in us, so that it flourishes in all that we do and say to one another, it is the first step in helping the world to understand how Christ has transformed glory. We give witness to the glory of God breathing through the life of a Christ-centered church. It’s not easy and we all fail at times but when we love like Jesus, little children, it will be apparent to all that we are his. And in the end…Love wins!