Who we love

The Rev. Alissa Newton

Fifth Sunday of Easter

text: John 13:31-35 and Acts 11:1-18

We were fighting so relentlessly that day, my brother and I, that my mother left us in the car. The three of us were grocery shopping and my harried mom was done with listening, and done with playing referee. Ben and I were in a phase of our sibling relationship where we were always on each other’s backs – verbal sparring that devolved quickly into yelling, and then somebody (usually me) ended up crying. I was maybe in 3rd or 4th grade, and Ben was a couple years ahead of me. It was a different time, back then. You could leave your kids in the car without judgement. What I remember about that day was that it was sunny, the car was warm but not hot, and Ben and I were sitting in the car screaming at each other when an old woman we didn’t know came up and tapped on the window. Startled, we stopped, and cracked the glass just enough to be able to hear what she had to say. “You kids,” the strange woman said to us with amusement in her voice. “Look at you fight. You don’t know it now, but you are going to love each other someday. Someday you two are going to be best friends.” And then she walked away, leaving two grumpy and silenced children in her wake. I don’t remember what happened after that – maybe we were quiet, or maybe we each took a breath and started up our fight again. But I remember what she said. I remember it because I already did love my brother – there’s no way I would have fought like that with someone I didn’t love. I fought with Ben because it was so unfair – that this was the brother I loved, this person who didn’t always like me, whose thought processes and feelings were so different than mine, who didn’t always love me back in the ways I would have preferred. If it had been my choice, I would have crafted a different brother – one more like me, to be honest. But I didn’t get to choose.

In our gospel lesson this morning, Jesus is basically the woman tapping on the window. We’re told that Judas has just gone out – Judas the betrayer, on his way to do the betraying that puts the final nails in the coffin, so to speak, of all the trauma of Holy Week. Jesus knows that this is what Judas is up to, and it is within the context of this that he tells his disciples that there’s one more thing they are compelled to do, one final commandment they need to keep as a response to their experience of Jesus. “Just as I have loved you, you must love one another.” Even these men – men who have walked away from families and jobs and even their own religion to some degree – even they do not get to choose who to love. They get to love each other, and it won’t be how well they change their political system, or how well they love Jesus, or how well they build a church structure that is sustainable throughout time that will define them, Jesus says. It is how well they love.

Now, because I talked about the Greek words for love last week, about how there are different words in the original Greek for different kinds of love, I’ll go ahead and make sure to say that Jesus asked them to have agape love for each other. Agape is universal love – different from the love we feel for our romantic partners in the beginning, and different from the way we love our family and closest friends. Agape is the love that God feels for God’s world – a love that is as deep and unshakable as the love that a mother feels for her child, and yet somehow God feels this love for every part of creation. We have a hard time imagining this – or at least I do. We have a hard time imagining this love because for us, love is inherently conditional. Whether I choose it or not, I love my brother. And I know I love him, in part, because there are other people in this world who I don’t love. I compare my feelings for them, with my feelings for Ben, and it’s very clear to me that like it or not, I love that guy. (and these days, as the old woman predicted, my sibling and I enjoy and cherish our relationship very much.) Agape is like that – the deep and unconditional love some of us feel for our closest family and friends – but agape is for everyone and everything. So when Jesus, in the wake of Judas’ departure, tells his disciples they will be known by how well they agape-love each other, he’s telling them that not only do they have to love each other, people they already know and have some relationship with, but that part of being Christ-followers is going to be expanding that love to other people. People like Judas, who hurt and betray them. People like Pilate, who sees the disciples, Jesus, and people like them as expendable for the sake of political privilege and gain. Criminals, like the men who will be executed on either side of their beloved teacher and friend. Jesus is telling his disciples, and us today, that in order to be Christian, they will have to take the brotherly, friendly, family love they already feel and practice and expand it to places and people they do not want to be in loving relationship with.

And we see the beginning of this struggle to keep this final commandment in our scripture from Acts today, don’t we? The community in Acts is made up of people who knew Jesus and people who have come to believe in him since his death and resurrection. In the beginning they all, already, belong to each other because of a common cultural and religious background. They’re all Jewish. Much of the story of Acts is the story of this community working on whether or not people who are different from them in religious practice can believe in Jesus – and today we see Peter opening up membership in the community to Gentiles. It’s not easy, this process of expanding the more natural and more acceptable care and connection felt between members of the same culture and religion to those who don’t belong. But they do it – they do it because that’s how to be a Christian. “Everyone will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another.”

Jesus asked his disciples to love each other as he loved – a love that held tight to the motley crew of disciples who would desert him, a love that included betrayers, criminals, politicians, tax collectors, slaves, women, children, executioners, and even Gentiles. Jesus asked them, and today also asks us, to consider taking the love that God has already given us and expanding it to the people we don’t want to love, the people we are afraid of, people who want to harm us, and even the people we cannot imagine we have anything in common with. All of these, Jesus says, are just as connected to you as your brother, your sister, your family, your child. How you respond to them in this world – this is how you will be known.

So I ask us, this morning, who is it in this world that we don’t want to be connected to? Who is it that we do not want to love? On one level, this might include people we are already forever tied to, our Judases and Peters. For you it might be difficult parents, spouses or exes, children or friends who are trying our patience, the loved ones who refuse to be the people we would prefer them to be, who refuse to love us back in the ways we would prefer. Jesus invites us to his table this morning to eat and drink and then to go and love the people we have, instead of the people we’d prefer. On another level this command to love may be calling you to look bigger than your own circle of family and friends. Who are the people who frighten, annoy, and disgust you – our “gentiles?” The ones who are so culturally, politically, or economically different from you that it is easier to dismiss them, to lump them into stereotypes, to position yourself as forever separate from them? Jesus invites us to his table this morning to eat and drink and then to go and love the people we hate, the people we fear, and the people we do not understand. These, too, are part of God’s world, are included in God’s Agape love.

It’s not a small thing, church, this final commandment of Jesus. It is the work of our life, together, and our lives, individually. It is a work that is enough to keep us busy all the days of our lives, and to challenge us and shape us for the whole journey. This is why we come back to this table each week for sustenance, to experience God in bread, wine, and each other. We start this loving here, in this place where we strive to make all welcome, where we learn by listening, by trying, by messing up, by trying again, by always returning to loving each other and making community together. Come and eat, Jesus says, and then go out and love. We’ll keep at this as long as it takes, together.