Commanded to Love

Scripture: John 15:9-17

The verse that may sound the most familiar to you in today’s reading from the Gospel of John is when Jesus says, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” It has a nice sound, doesn’t it, and a pleasant message. Yes, yes, love each other as I have loved you. Wait a minute, what? Jesus says in today’s Gospel that, basically, we’re supposed to love each other the way he loves us. That is a pretty tall order. Jesus was an awfully nice guy, you know. And the next verse isn’t much more encouraging, “No-one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Okay, sure Jesus. Sounds great.

The truth is, if I’m honest about it, being like Jesus is something more of an aspiration than a day to day reality. It is helpful to remember that Jesus didn’t always show his love in nice, polite ways. Sometimes he got angry in defense of God. Sometimes he was playful and obscure in his teaching. But still, here is a person who dedicates his whole life to the people he loves, lays down his life for his friends, even to the point of a humiliating death. That is a pretty tall order, and for me at least, there is the potential for a side-serving of guilt, because there’s no way, really, to live up to that. So it can feel a little heavy to hear these words from Scripture: “love one another as I have loved you.”

And yet, reading through the whole passage, Jesus seems to be so sweet and sincere in giving this commandment, that it’s hard to hold onto the heaviness. “I’m giving you this command,” he says, “because I want you to have the joy that I have. I want your joy to be complete.” “I’m giving you this command,” he says, “So that you’ll be able to love each other. I love you, and I want you to love each other.” It’s like even this command is part of Jesus’ love for his disciples.

Our passage today comes from one of John’s farewell discourses, which is to say, one of the many speeches Jesus gives on his way to the cross. He is hoping to impart the most important parts of his wisdom to his disciples. One of Jesus’ key teachings was about the kingdom, or the sovereign realm of God. This is a new reality that God is bringing about – a social, political, cultural, and religious transformation to a world reigned, not by fear or greed, but by love, the deep and abiding love of God. And so, in a way, what Jesus seems to be saying is, here is a picture of what life in the realm of God looks like. You’ll be like branches, woven together, chosen by God, cared for and pruned by God, and bearing fruit that lasts. I’ve chosen you, you didn’t choose me. And this is the life I have for you – one marked by love, by joy, and by friendship with God.

You might be interested to know that in the Greek, even when Jesus is talking about the disciples as his friends, he is still talking about love. He uses the word “philos” to talk about friends, which basically means “one who is loved,” and has the same root as Philadelphia – the city of brotherly love, or philosophy – the love of wisdom.

Many years, someone I know – I’ll call him Paul – was having a difficult time, financially. He had enough to live on, but just barely, and sometimes there was food in the fridge, and sometimes, there wasn’t much. His friends decided, during this difficult time, that it would be a good idea to have a potluck party, and they invited themselves over to Paul’s house to enjoy their casseroles and salads, and the side dishes and whatever else you think of at a potluck. At the end of the meal, there were a lot of leftovers, and the friends left them behind for Paul to finish, which he was glad to do. Only years later, looking back, did he realize his friends’ hidden intention to make sure that he had enough to eat, at least for that week. Paul’s friends loved him, and they loved him in such a way that he wasn’t even aware of what they were really doing at the time.

I think sometimes, it’s easy to imagine our love as being like a bucket full of water – something to be carefully stewarded. To love with abandon, without boundaries is akin to throwing the bucket all at once. It makes a big splash, but then it’s over. By contrast, a slow trickle of love makes the bucket last longer, but in the meantime it’s not very life-giving.

I think what Jesus is calling us to in this passage is to fill our buckets, again and again, in the deep well of God’s love – the overflowing spring of Jesus’ love – the constantly renewed aquifers of the Holy Spirit. Instead of holding onto our bucket, and portioning out its contents carefully and precisely, let’s find a way, instead to keep drawing from God’s deep and infinite well, and distributing the cool, refreshing life we find there – wells and springs springing up to eternal life.

How do we do this? Abide in me, Jesus says. I am the vine, you are the branches. Live in my love, make it your home, just as I make my home in God, my loving Parent. Live in my love, and love each other. Don’t hold onto your little bucket, but pour and draw and pour again, and live in the joy of being the vessel of God’s light, the Christ-bearer, the source and receiver of love passing through you, the joy of bearing rich fruit, fruit that lasts.

In Reasons of the Heart, John S. Dunne writes, “Our minds’ desire is to know, to understand; but our hearts desire is intimacy, to be known, to be understood. To see God with our mind would be to know God, to understand God; but to see God with our heart would be to have a sense of being known by God, of being understood by God.”

God knows you, God understands you, God chooses you, God loves you. Abide in that love, now and always, that you may bear much fruit. Thanks be to God, Amen.

Sustained by God's Love

Scriptures: John 10: 11-18, 1 John 3:16-24

Good morning, friends. Today we have the opportunity to reflect on Jesus as the Good Shepherd. In the United Church of Christ, we recognize our unity by agreeing together that Jesus Christ is the head of the church. Jesus is our leader and our organizer, our pastor and our guide through our life together as the gathered people of God. A very old metaphor for that leadership, dating even from the time of David in ancient Israel, is of the king and leader as shepherd of the people. I hope that today we will be able to reflect on what it means for Jesus to be our Good Shepherd. I’d like to begin with a sung prayer. If you know it, feel free to sing with me. Let us pray.

Open our Eyes, Lord

I have to admit at the outset that the image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd is one that gives me some trouble. First of all, none of us here, so far as I know, have a lot of direct personal experience with sheep and shepherding. I went to the Maryland State Fair a few years ago and watched the 4-H kids present their sheep for judging. I had no idea how loudly and frequently sheep do their bleating. And it sounds just a little bit human. It’s weird. The kids were maybe 10 or 12 years old, and their sheep had a tendency to get away from them. So if you want to control a sheep, you kind of grab it around under its mouth, and then it gets real still. One boy in particular tried to do this with his sheep, but it ignored him, and wandered around, barely under control. When one of the judges came over, though, to grab the sheep under its chin, it stopped dead in its tracks. The judge was clearly experienced in dealing with sheep.

So I think that if we were rural folks, living day to day with sheep, knowing how much it costs to buy a sheep, or when they have their lambs, just like we know where the nearest Farm Store or Wal Mart or grocery store is to our house, or how to use the telephone, then I think the metaphor of a Good Shepherd would make a lot more sense, and help us understand intuitively what God is saying to us through the gospel lesson today.

I also don’t like the idea of being called a sheep. As I mentioned, the sheep I saw at the state fair were obnoxiously loud, not very disciplined, and jumpy. Rumor has it that sheep are kind of stupid, too. For example, they can’t drink water out of a running stream, and they follow the herd whether or not the herd is going in a good direction. They go wandering off, they get lost, and they can’t defend themselves against wolves. I know it’s Jesus saying it, but it’s kind of a blow to the ego to be identified with a sheep, even if they are kind of cute.

Finally, the image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, in my mind, somehow seems to go hand in hand with tame, nice, white Jesus. This is the Jesus who never gets angry, never starts a fight, is always polite, and would be a good person to bring home to meet your mother. This is the Jesus of the What Would Jesus Do? bracelets, since I’m guessing that the answer to that question – What Would Jesus Do? – for those wearing the bracelets, isn’t usually to upset authorities, confront hypocrisy, or call for the inclusion of outcasts in society. The truth is, though, that if you read the Bible, there’s a lot more to Jesus than being nice. Jesus wasn’t white, he wasn’t always polite, and sometimes he even got angry. In the gospels, Jesus is full of life, filling the pages with his wisdom and his wittiness, and his spirit of BOTH love AND challenge.

So I think when our metaphors about Jesus as the Good Shepherd obscure Jesus and tame him, making him into a kind of a blank wall of niceness, then there is a problem. Jesus is more than that, and we lose out if we forget that.

We can see some more of what it means for Jesus to be our Good Shepherd in this morning’s gospel lesson from John. First of all, Jesus is the Good Shepherd as distinguished from a hired hand. The shepherd is the one who owns the sheep. The shepherd has skin in the game. The guy they hire to watch the sheep, on the other hand, doesn’t have the same investment. “Hey, I just work here,” he says as he runs away, leaving the sheep vulnerable to the attacking wolf. It’s the difference between a homeowner and a tenant, a business owner and an employee, a parent and a babysitter. “I am the good shepherd,” Jesus says, “and you belong to me.”

Second, as the good shepherd, Jesus knows his sheep. I don’t know about you, but when I’ve driven past a field of cows beside a highway, I wouldn’t have the first clue about telling them apart. They all look the same to me. And yet, I could pick my cat Tuesday out of a crowd any day. If you have a pet, you know – they have their own personalities, habits, and moods. In the same way, we’re not just part of an indistinguishable mass for Jesus. Jesus knows each one of us – our personalities, our fears and weaknesses, our hopes, strengths and joys.

Third, as the good shepherd, Jesus lays down his life for his sheep. And I think this gets at the idea of nice Jesus versus real Jesus pretty clearly. In verse 18, Jesus says, “No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again.” Jesus has power and strength to lay down his life for us, and to take it up again. Jesus is not tamed or cowed by the powers of the world. Instead, he is master of them and of us as well.

What does this mean for us today? Jesus as our Good Shepherd offers us both comfort and a challenge. In the epistle reading we heard from 1 John this morning, there is the comfort of knowing God’s tremendous love for us. It starts, “We know love by this, that Jesus laid down his life for us.” Jesus gave us everything – his ministry of teaching and healing, his message of the good news of the kingdom of God, and then in the end, his very life, his death, and his resurrection. This is the model of love for us.

And in our day to day lives, we continue to live sustained by God’s grace. God leads us into green pastures day after day in the food we eat, the friends and family we meet, in the rising sun and the falling rain. God calls us to still waters of rest and refreshment, and God walks with us through the dark and dangerous valleys of our lives.

At the same time, there is a challenge in the image of Jesus as the good shepherd. We are no longer our own – we belong to Jesus, and we’re called to follow where he leads. The full verse of 1 John goes on to say, “And we ought to lay down our lives for one another,” through the service and ministry God calls us to. This may feel like a tall order sometimes, to love not in word or speech, but in truth and action. And yet, even in this challenge, God is the source of our love. Love comes through us in response to God’s love. Like so much wool, from well-fed sheep, I suppose. It’s not like sheep sit around trying to grow out their wool: “Edna, I can feel it growing!” “Are you sure Angela?” “Yeah! I’ve been working really hard on my wool-growing exercises!” I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works.
That’s fun to imagine, actually. Anyway, my point is that the key to learning to live in God’s love and learning to share it is to abide in the graciousness of God’s gifts to us. Even the gift of human love is, ultimately, from God, our Good Shepherd, our Maker, and our Guiding Spirit. We are sustained, now and always, by God’s grace. Thanks be to God, Amen.