"Love One Another"
God calls us to show the kind of love Jesus demonstrated
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. David McMaster
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Text: 1 John 2:7-17
With Valentine's Day on the horizon, jewellers, florists, card shops and chocolatiers are doing a booming business. Romance is in the air and Valentine's Day is a big deal in North American calendars. Across the big pond, however, traditions were a little different when I was growing up. Most of what is associated with the day here was ignored, though it was a day for love and mystery. Card-giving occurred, but it was in a much more limited way, and cards were rarely signed. An individual would declare his or her love for another and the recipient of the card was left to figure out who “had the hots” for them. It was a great game, particularly in schoolyards filled with adolescents. Valentine's Day would arrive and everyone was abuzz. “Did you get one (a card)?” “Do you know from whom?” As soon as someone announced that he/she had received a card, the grapevine around the school would begin to work. Inevitably, later in the day some friend from among the opposite sex would enlighten you as to who had sent the card and the choice was then yours to ask that person out. The secret admirer element made it fun. Warm, gushy feelings were expressed and, in some cases, true love.
I. Love: Needed but often broken
Apparently almost all of us need love, whether of the romantic kind or the emotional connectedness we can have with other human beings. If you have taken a first year psychology course at university, you may recall reading about a study of behaviour patterns in young monkeys. Social scientists have looked at how monkeys act under various types of emotional deprivation. In a study, some were placed in an enclosed space by themselves; they were fed properly but deprived of a mother's affection. Others were removed from their mothers but given a stuffed toy, while yet others were studied with their mothers. What the researchers found was that young monkeys with their mothers expressed normal behaviour, whereas those deprived of maternal connection expressed deviant forms of behaviour. The group with the stuffed toy were somewhere in the middle and the affection-starved monkeys could be seen using the toy as a sort of surrogate mother with which they could cuddle up and rest. Researchers opined that young animals need affection and love; they need to feel close to another body. That is true of humans as well, whether young or not so young. We love to be loved; we thrive on affection; we need our parents, our spouses, our children, our friends.
One of the unfortunate things in our society, however, is that love in whatever form is not always shown. One thinks of the little baby who has been named by her caregivers, “Angelica Leslie,” abused and thrown away in a stairwell of our city like an old toy. One thinks of increasing amounts of gun and other forms of violence. In certain parts of the city we see love gone awry as young people join street gangs, banding together out of some perverted sense of love and acceptance - a love that can then go on rampages challenging, hurting, and afflicting others not within the gang. When it comes to families, far too many experience dysfunction and broken relationships. And even in Christian environments, it is sad to say, there are times when something other than love seems to reign in our dealings with one another.
II. Love: John's advice to the community
These are not just problems of this age, however. They occurred also in the first century and in the first century Church. When Paul wrote to Corinth, circumstances there made him exhort the believers several times to love one another. Likewise, in our passage today from John's first epistle, something must have precipitated John's encouragement of his community to love - not once, not twice, but three times within a short letter.
In the first of the three passages, in Chapter 2, John reminds his readers of the continuity of God's desires on the subject of love when he says,
I am not giving you a new commandment but an old one which you have heard from the beginning … Yet, I am writing you a new commandment that is true in him and in you because the darkness is passing and the true light is already shining.(2:7, 8)
John's words are an odd sort of statement. “This isn't new,” he says, “it is old. Yet,” he goes on, “it is new.” That sounds like something written by someone who knows what he's talking about. It sounds like the person who, describing how one thing resembled another, said, “Well it's the same ... it's the same only different.” John says that he gives a command that is old and new. How can a command be old but also new?
Well, when he says that the command is old, he means that it was something that had already been given in the old law, in the Torah, the books of Moses. For generations, the Law had been revered by the Jewish community. It was the word of God and Jews and Christians have never wavered in their acceptance of the ancient words as God's revelation. So when a passage such as Leviticus 19:18 commands that God's people love one another, it is an old and cherished charge to them. “Love your neighbours as yourselves, for I am the Lord,” says God in a directive that was to govern human relations always. It was an old command.
But John says, “Yet this command is new,” and one may well ask, “How can what is old be new at the same time?” A clue to his thought can be found as he goes on to speak of the relationship between light and darkness in verse 8 of this pericope. “The darkness is passing away the true light is already shining.”
You may remember in The Gospel of John that John refers to Jesus as the light of the world. In the first chapter he calls Jesus, “the light of all people;” (1:4) “the light which shines in the darkness.” (1:5) John the Baptist, he says, testified to this light; (1:7) Jesus was the true light who enlightens everyone. (1:9) Jesus, as the light, was therefore a strong theme in the Johannine community and gospel. So when John says in his letter, “I am writing to you a new commandment ... because the darkness is passing away and the true light is shining,” he is referring to the fact that God has done something new. The old has been made new in the light that has come into the world in Christ. In Christ, God redefined love so that love took on another dimension; love could be seen at another level.
When you think about it, there are many spheres of life in which it is possible for things to be old and yet seem to reach new standards in a particular person. Many hockey fans see Wayne Gretzky as a person who took ice hockey to another level. In his younger days, when he had the 212 point season, he was amazing, unstoppable. In him the old game of hockey was seen at a different level. When we think of music, an old piece of music may be a new thing when it is played by a great orchestra under the baton of a great conductor.
Likewise love became something new in Jesus Christ. Love's boundaries were extended beyond what had hitherto been known. Jesus' love reached out to every Jew in the land of Judaea. It reached out to Jewish leaders; it reached out to the tax collectors and sinners; it reached out to the prostitutes; it reached out to the hated Samaritans; it reached out even to those who would nail him on the cross, as he prayed, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” Jesus' love was endless. “It could well be,” writes New Testament scholar William Barclay, “that men did not really know what love was until they saw it in Jesus Christ.”
So when John speaks of love, he can speak of it as something old and something new. It was old in the sense that it was given in the old law, the Torah. It was new in the sense that since the true light had come in Jesus, love was pushed to new levels, and he tells believers: Love one another as Jesus has loved you.
III. What does this mean?
The world today needs that love. We need it on our streets, we need it in our homes and we need it in our churches. And this is where John really goes with love. It is as if he says to us, above all, you who are in Christ, who have received the spirit of Christ, love one another. Here he is not talking of a romantic love per se - perhaps not even a loving, emotional type of connectedness, but a love marked by mutual care, support and fairness. It is a love that will step up and help a fellow believer when there is need; a love that will provide a cup of water to the thirsty and a loaf of bread to the hungry. Christians are called to live in koinonia, which is a beautiful Greek word meaning community (common unity), partnership or fellowship. The basis for this is in the mystical joining of the spirit of Christ to every believer. It is something we have in common, a link that draws us into a vital and genuine bond, the nature of which is love.
We have this innate need to love and be loved, we have a command from God to love, yet so often our attempts to love go completely awry. I remember a congregational meeting a number of years ago at which a trivial matter of what we should call our youth leader - his title - almost resulted in blows being struck. Individuals who had been going to that church for 40 or 50 years, and should have known better, opposed one another. One fellow's blood started to boil so much that his whole face and neck grew red; he fumed. The pastor of the church decided to call for a break. Out in the hall, two of the men went at it again. I called one over and talked to him. He was so angry, and his hands were shaking so much that the coffee in his cup began to spill out of his cup and onto the floor. He was livid over a simple thing like a title.
But it doesn't need to be like that; we are called to love one another. One place I have seen that working, for instance, is in AA meetings. Author, Philip Yancey, tells a story about times he has accompanied a friend to meetings as a show of solidarity with him. The group, he said, included a well-known television broadcaster, several prominent business people, a number of unemployed people, and a couple of kids who wore Band-Aids to hide needle marks. The sharing time, says Yancey, was amazing. “Hi, I'm Tom,” said one. “I'm an alcoholic and a drug addict.” “Hi, Tom!” everyone shouted out in unison. Yancey said the support, warm responses, and many hugs showed a love and compassion that should be a part of many human interactions, especially those in our churches.
And we can go further. You are probably familiar with Mel Gibson's film, The Passion of the Christ that came out a few years ago. The film depicts the last hours of Jesus' life. I recall going to a theatre alone to watch it. For whatever reason, I bought popcorn, but from the opening scene on I had to put it down. It was almost as if I was entering into some holy moment, I was transfixed. Many people struggled with the depiction of violence in the film. I thought it accurate in terms of the type of suffering Jesus incurred but probably over the top in terms of how much a human being could handle. That aside, the film moved me greatly and as Jesus hung on the cross, the words that kept coming to my mind were, “Greater love has no man than this than that he lay down his life for his friends.” That is a tall order, but that is love.
If you ever watch the television series, Touched by an Angel, you may recall an episode in which the character Monica, played by Rona Downey, had to minister to a person who had lost it all. He had been quite successful but was now on the street when Monica was called in to show him the true meaning of love. At first the interactions of the angel, Monica with this individual were straightforward and easy, but as the story went on, she had to give and give more. She had to step way outside her comfort zone in showing love to this man. The subplot dealt with Monica's struggle to love someone who had become unlovable. The key scene was when she had to take off the boots of this homeless man. As the boots came off, odorous, diseased feet covered in sores were revealed. Monica recoiled; she didn't want to touch them, but had been called to show love. You could see her inner struggle as she lifted these terrible, diseased feet into a basin and began to bathe them. In her care, the man began to find himself again.
As Christians, we have been called to love. We have been called especially to love one another, and as we have just entered the Lenten season, perhaps we would do well to ask ourselves how we have fared. Jesus has set a new standard for an ancient command. Maybe we are not always called to engage in the kind of sacrificial love that Rona Downey's character experienced, nor are we often called to emulate the sacrifice that Jesus made. But how do we fare in our relationships with others? Do we express love as a general way of being? Are we willing to love even if it means stretching sometimes to love those we are less than comfortable with? It's easy to love those who are more or less like us, but what of those who are outside that box? How do we fare?
When Jesus sent his spirit to us, it was a spirit of unity and love. When he sealed us with his spirit, he was readying us for heaven, and he tells us to carry on as if we are in heaven now. We are charged with making our churches forerunners of what heaven will be like and bringing a little bit of heaven into the lives of everyone we come across. Let us love one another.