Empowered to Love as Jesus Loves
Easter 6 – May 13, 2012
You may have heard or seen the story about Stephanie Decker and her family in the news recently. She's the woman from Henryville, Indiana, a town that was flattened by a series of tornadoes back in the beginning of March. In the midst of all that tragedy, Mrs. Decker made news because on that day, knowing the tornadoes were headed straight for her home, she gathered up her young son and daughter and hustled with them to the basement. She sat them together, threw a comforter over them, and then shielded them with her own body as the storm ripped their house to shreds around them. Debris and wreckage rained down on them, severing both her legs. When the tornado passed, they had all survived, but Stephanie lost both of her legs at about the knee. Miraculously though, her kids were fine; they didn't even get a scratch.
She was rightfully proclaimed as a hero, and just this week her story resurfaced as she and her family were brought to New York to take in a Yankees game, and were given makeovers before being featured on the Today Show's “Moms Rule” segment.
These are the kind of stories that we like to hear, stories that inspire and touch us with the reminder that people are capable of doing incredible things for others in the name of love. And while such stories are not completely absent from our world, they are unusual enough that when they do occur, they make the news, and we are amazed, because we know that that kind of self-sacrifice and self-giving love are relatively rare.
And knowing what a rarity such acts are helps us enter into the gospel story for today. It helps to move just from just listening to these kind of abstract words into more concrete examples of what Jesus is talking about to the disciples here, to start to grasp what all of his talk of love really means. Because these words about friendship and love are nice. They sound good, but it's only when we start to dig into them and the situation Jesus was in that we realize how deep they go.
We hear Jesus speaking in this passage on the night of his betrayal. The scene is the Last Supper. Danger lurks in the shadows of the room. Jesus' somber prediction that everyone will desert him and that one will betray him is still lingering in the air. Judas has already left the building, bent on a mission to hand Jesus over to the authorities. And with all that swirling around them, Jesus speaks to them of friendship, of abiding love. He reminds them of the love that exists between him and God the Father, the love Jesus has for his friends, and of the love that they are now to have for one another. “This is my commandment,” Jesus says, “that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends” (vv. 12-13).
This is the kind of love Jesus commands them to live out, a love that is willing to give itself up, to die if necessary. Now, from what I read, this wouldn't have been a totally new concept for the disciples. The ancient Greek and Roman world had quite a high opinion of friendship. Philosophers like Plato and Aristotle and others all spoke and wrote about this ideal of a true friend being someone who would be willing to lay down his life. But then, as now, just because it was an idea doesn't mean it happened all that often. It was rare even then to find someone who could love another to the point of actually dying for them. And yet this is what Jesus is calling and commanding them to do – to love that fully, that deeply, that completely.
It's what he commands us as his followers today to do too. And as I said, these are nice, romantic, inspiring words, but we know how unusual that kind of love is. We wonder, if faced with the choice or necessity, would we be able to go through with it? And maybe, in an intense, dramatic event such as Stephanie Decker faced, with adrenaline pumping, we could see how it might happen. But what about our everyday lives, living out love that's not only willing to perhaps die, but also to live with and put up with and honor and seek the best for others? The kind of love that's willing to lay down its selfishness, and petty complaints, and our desire to get our own needs met first – we know we fail to live that out everyday... not just with strangers and neighbors but with our friends and family and those we love! When we start to get into this gospel and what it means for how Jesus actually wants us to live, we realize what a tall order this is, how impossible it is for us to love as Jesus loves us. His words sound good in theory, but in practice, BOY are they ever hard to live up to.
But this is exactly what we see Jesus do. That's what makes his words different than all those philosophers and writers who proclaimed this kind of friendship as a virtue. Not in an intense moment where he was pushed to act, but deliberately, willingly, Jesus gives his life for the world – for his disciples then, for you and me now. Jesus saw the writing on the wall. He knew what was coming – and he could have found a way out if he chose to – but he didn't. This is what he came to do. He goes from this meal with his followers, straight to the garden where he knew Judas would lead those who wanted him dead, and when they came, with lanterns and torches and weapons, Jesus steps forward to meet them. “Who are you looking for?” he asks, and when they say, “Jesus of Nazareth,” he doesn't hesitate to say, “I am he.”
“No one takes my life from me,” he had said back in what we know as chapter 10. “I lay it down of my own accord.” Jesus lives out what he has been teaching, revealing his love as the greatest love, love that lays itself down for his friends.
This is the love Jesus has for us. It's the love that flows constantly between the Father and the Son, love that overflows to us and the whole world. It is his love that lives in us, as we live in him and abide in him, his love that moves us past just seeing ourselves and looking out for #1, his love that empowers us to love like Jesus. This kind of self-giving, self-sacrificing love doesn't come from within us. It starts with Jesus. And it is his love that Jesus chose us and appointed us to carry into the world, his love that enables us to bear and share fruit that lasts. We may not be called to go to extremes like Stephanie Decker had to. We may be called to lay our lives down in a million small anonymous ways, we may not get any recognition for it, but this is way we are commanded to love, every day, giving ourselves away and reminding those we meet through our words and actions that they too are people Jesus loves, people Jesus laid his life down for, empowered to do so because we have seen and experienced and know just how much Jesus love us.
Thanks be to God!
Amen.
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