Saint John 15:9-17
Whenever this text comes up, in which Jesus waxes grand-eloquent on the subject of love, I am always reminded of Calvin Cooledge. It’s a stretch, I know, so hang with me.
The story goes that President Calvin Coolidge, who was known as a person of few words, one day went to church and his wife Grace stayed home. When he got home, Grace asked him what the sermon had been about. “Sin,” replied Cal. “What did the preacher have to say about it.” Grace asked. Cal paused, sighed, and replied, “He was against it.”
If today, on the highly unlikely chance that someone asked you what your pastor talked about you can say: “Love.” And it they ask you to say more, you can reply “He was for it.”
I am. But in a measured, some would say, a little cynical way. Perhaps that because I am such a fan of Operas and Musicals.
True love that ends tragically is the part of countless operas. From the moment that the hero or heroine professes undying love you know that somebody’s death will come before the final curtain falls. Even a light-hearted opera like Carman, with one memorable tune after another, Carmen is murdered by her lover, bringing to a close another fun-filled evening of theatre.
The same is true for musicals that usually revolve around the almost identical plot of one person meeting another person “across a crowded room” and finding true love. Think of it!
Emile de Becque, a middle-aged French expatriate, who has become a plantation owner on a South Pacific Island, instantly falls in love with Ensign Nellie Forbush, an optimistic and naive young American navy nurse from Little Rock, Arkansas.
Tony and Maria, a modern-day Romeo and Juliet, from different ethnic groups and different gangs spy each other at a community dance and before you know it, they are staring into each other’s eyes, kissing, and pledging that they never be apart. We all know the trouble that caused.
Even in the play “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing”, which gave us such a heart-warming title song the main character is killed off. While, some musicals tell us that, love may make “the world go round” they should come with Harry Carey’s warning, “there’s danger here Charie.”
I always thought a better, more truthful song about love appears in the rarely performed musical Aspects of Love by Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber. “Love Changes Everything. Brings you glory. Brings you shame. {Yes, love changes everything and} Nothing in the world will ever be the same ”
That is more like it. It is not starry-eyed and star-crossed lovers in a chance encounter on a South Pacific Island. It is not sweaty teenagers on a dance floor.
All of us who have experienced real love in our lives know it has challenges, takes work, and causes us to grow. It can “change everything.”
This is the kind of love Jesus was talking about when he gave his one and only commandment to his disciples. “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”1
You won’t find that in many musicals. It is a love so radical, so tough, that is has led more than one cynic to suggest that we would have been better off if Jesus had just stuck with the original ten commandments rather than adding this additional one. Furthermore, the context makes this command seem even more daunting.
The scholars who constructed the Revised Common Lectionary (Whom some of us believe were members of the faculty of Hogwarts!) have magically transported us back, on this the Fifth Sunday of Easter, to not only before the resurrection but before the crucifixion.
We are, once again, in the upper room with Jesus and his disciples. They have just finished their Passover Seder. Jesus, noticing that none of his friends had done this menial task, gets up from the table, girds himself with a towel and washes his disciples' feet. Then he predicts that one of those friends whose feet he has just washed will verbally betray him (Peter) while another will physically betray him (Judas).
Instead of lashing out with a real scolding for being so disloyal Jesus instead commands them to love one another in the same way he has loved them.
However, for John, “the love that Jesus commands his disciples to have for one another is specifically a love for other believers. It is a love directed at those who have believed in Jesus as the Messiah and who follow him. This group of believers include both Jews and Gentiles.”2
In other words, it is a love that is meant for everybody.
That was the early Church’s problem as they goes around preaching about Jesus.
They were attracting all sorts of believers. Not only devout Jews but also Gentiles and even those who had no former religious interest or affiliation. “And it is at this point of growth, and change, and expansion that the first church faces a conflict and controversy that will either unmake it or reorganize it completely.”3
Jesus’ love will either change everything, or it won’t.
We’ve seen what happens when it doesn’t.
We’ve seen what happens when people are excluded because they think in ways that are different or, worse yet, not exactly like our own. We know what happens in the name of theological purity. Churches, people, nations become divided.
We've seen what happens when people are excluded because of their race, or creed, clan or faction, or orientation. I’ve always wondered how many good people have been kept outside of the church by the unlovely attitudes of the people on the inside?
This is not some new struggle that we have just developed it is an attitude that goes all the way back to the Book of Acts.
We see it in today’s reading.
Peter has been struggling with the new direction of inclusion that he has been given. The church then, as is sometimes the case with the church now, is highly resistant to Peter’s spirit. Peter’s new notion of the inclusive love of Jesus will change everything.
Was this following Jesus business for insiders or was it for outsiders? And what kind of outsiders? Was it for people like them, who looked like them, acted like them, followed the same religious customs, or was Peter and his friends just going to let in anybody and everybody.
It seems that Peter is going to let everybody in and let Christ’s love change them.
He was looking around and discovering that the same message that moved him to follow Jesus was moving others. This thing they were a part of was unstoppable, uncontrollable, unimaginable. It was going to be bigger than they ever dared dreamed because it was going to be for all people, everywhere.
Peter and his sister and brother followers of Jesus were bearing fruit with a love that changed them, was changing others, was changing everything.
Not all musicals or operas end in disaster and death.
Good-by Mr. Chips, concludes with Professor Arthur Chipping, looking back at his life and remembering that day when his liberal, modern, young wife upended the singing of the school song during a morning chapel turning it from a dirge into a rousing chorus. She started as a lone voice picking up the tempo, and was surprisingly joined by the headmaster’s wife, and finally, gradually, the students and even members of the faculty.
After his retirement Professor Chipping, Mr. Chips, while walking around campus, looks back at the school he served and loved for so long and remembers that moment and the words of the song, singing it softly to himself:
“In the evening of my life I shall look to the sunset,
At a moment in my life when the night is due.
And the question I shall ask only God can answer.
Was I brave and strong and true?
Did I fill the world with love my whole life though?”
That's all Jesus asks us to do — fill our world with love.
It is more than enough for any of us, but it comes with the promise that by this everyone, yes everyone, shall know we are his disciples, if we "fill the world with love our whole lives through.”
So, in the highly unlikely chance, that sometime this week anyone should ask you what the preacher talked about last Sunday you can tell them: “Love.” Then wait for a moment and add: “He was for it.”
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1. St. John 13:34-35. (NKJV) [NKJV=The New King James Version]
2. Mark Price, “John 13:31-35. Commentary 1: Connecting the Reading to Scripture,” Connections. A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship 2 (Louisville, KY: Westminister|John Knox Press, 2018): pp. 262-265.
3. Kristin Adkins Whitesides, “Standing in the Way,” Day 1, May 9, 2022, https://day1.org/weekly-broadcast/62700a5c6615fba476000180/kristin-adkins-w hitesides-standing-in-the-way.
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