Sixth Sunday of Easter: May 5, 2024
Love and Friendship
The Rev. Nat Johnson
Acts 8:26-40
1 John 4:7-21
John 15:1-8
Psalm 22:24-30
Our gospel reading this week picks up where we left off last week: Jesus presses the metaphor of the vine and the branches to a new depth, further unpacking its meaning for his disciples. The primary word in the passage last week was “abide” – Jesus calls us (the branches) to abide in him (the vine) because just as a branch cannot bear fruit unless it abides in the vine, neither can we bear fruit unless we abide in him. This week’s passage continues that theme but this time, Jesus makes more explicit that to abide in him is to abide in his love. He draws a connection between what he asks of us and the kind of loving relationship he has with the one he calls Father. “Just as the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.” In calling us into this “chain of love,” Jesus establishes a new relationship with his followers, a relationship not based on the one-way dominance or even dependence that characterizes the master-slave or the patron-client relationship, but a relationship characterized by mutuality and self-giving.
We tend to use the word “love” flippantly in our culture. At the heart of our typical understanding of love is sentimentality or an emotional disposition that is limited by affinity and sameness. But Jesus has something else in mind and he connects his understanding of love with the example that he has just set before them in washing their feet – to love one another as Jesus loves us is to disrupt those boundaries of status that separate us from one another. Jesus loves in a way that cannot be surpassed and in that example of washing one another’s feet he sets the measure for all subsequent Christian love. In this sense, we can say that love is a Christian virtue, “an excellence of character that belongs to God by nature and in which we participate by grace.”i It is developed, like all virtues, through practice and discipline in our obedience to the command to love one another as we have been loved.
The ultimate expression of this love, Jesus tells us, is our willingness to lay down our lives for another. So, far from being a “feeling” or “emotion,” love is a conscious decision, an intentional act. Theologian, Emily Askew, comments that “Love in this passage is not a psychological state, nor is it anywhere described as an internal quality. Love is an action – a really difficult action. The definition of love is a radical willingness to die – not for a child or spouse, but for a fellow follower of Christ.”ii
In our privileged society, this can be a hard pill to swallow. It can sound inconceivable, perhaps even irrelevant. We have been socialized to believe that the individual rules, that our task in life is to care for and tend to ourselves above all others. The concept of dying for one another is antithetical to the competitive social and economic values that undergird our way of life.
Jesus’ command to love one another cuts across the grain of our social conditioning. To lay down one’s life for another as an act of love is to be present with and for each other in times of threat and crisis. Jesus doesn’t ask us to lay down our lives for him but for one another. And this entails making real choices in our lives about those to whom we extend a hand in friendship, about those with whom we stand in solidarity, about those for whom we fight for justice. When we love as Jesus loves us, our love becomes “impregnated with divine qualities” that makes sure justice is done in the world. As Cornell West says it, this kind of love takes the shape of justice in society.iii
Love is an action – it is embodied when we practice setting aside the prejudices and beliefs that form barriers between us, that keep us from being united in diversity – rich and poor, black and white, abled and disabled, straight and queer, republican and democrat.
Love refuses the certainties of the various binaries we’ve created as a means of organizing our world, our lives, and our relationships. Jesus’ love for his disciples – for us! – draws us into a new kind of relationship that is established in reciprocity and mutuality. It is egalitarian in nature and is not limited by the scarcity of time and place and difference.
Abiding in Christ’s love draws us into loving friendship with him, with God, and with one another. When Jesus says that if we obey his commandments we will abide in his love, he is not saying that our obedience buys us or secures us his love. Friendship with God is not a reward for our obedience to Jesus. In the metaphor of the vine and the branches, our obedience is to be understood as the means whereby our friendship with Jesus forms us as those who love as he loves us.
Love is an action, a practice, a discipline. When I was first discerning the call to be your priest-in-charge, I was struck by the description on our website that here, at St Peter’s, we think of ourselves as a “School of Love” and understand that “the goal of Christian community is to form us as followers of Jesus.” This school of love is “a place where we grow more and more into the people God is calling us to become.” In these short statements, I see a deep awareness and recognition that we “become the company we keep,” that the relationships we develop in this place, that the love we practice giving and receiving in this place, teaches us how to love beyond the walls of our parish community.
The source of the love that we practice here is none other than the love with which Jesus loves us and this love forms us to be like Christ. This love is generative, always making more room so that love can continue to reproduce, to grow, to widen our boundaries and the breadth of our friendships. When we abide in Jesus’ love we are drawn into the intimacy of God’s relationship with Jesus and in turn we are formed in a particular way, becoming more and more like lovers who wash one another’s feet, who disrupt the boundaries of social status and rank, who stand in solidarity with the marginalized, and who offer the healing of restoration to all who the world disregards as worthless.
This kind of love, this kind of friendship, requires us to risk our own privileges and security. It requires us to set aside the familiar and the comfortable. It requires us to embrace the beauty of diversity, to stretch out our hand in friendship to those who the world constantly dehumanizes in an act of affirmation that both recognizes and honors the image of God they bear. Perhaps, in our culture, the call to physically die for another will remain a peripheral reality. But we are called, nonetheless, to lay down our lives for one another, to make conscious and intentional decisions to care for one another, especially those who bear the weight of difference and injustice. It requires more than just an ideological vision of equality, demanding our physical proximity and care for those we find on opposite sides of the social, racial, economic, and political barriers our world insists on erecting and maintaining.
Today, friends, let us set our hearts on the God who is love and embrace the friendship that God offers us in Christ. Surely, if we abide in this love we will be formed by this love and we will discover that to love as Christ loves us is not burdensome. The love of God is abundant and generative and if we abide in it, we will find that it overflows in our hearts and in our lives, and that our joy truly is perfected in the divine love that forms us as the people God is calling us to become.
i Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume One, “Theological Interpretation”
ii Working Preacher, 2021
iii Working Preacher, 2018