The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
John 15:9 “Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in My love. 10 If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments, and abide in His love. 11 These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full. 12 This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends. 14 You are My friends, if you do what I command you. 15 No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you. 16 You did not choose Me, but I chose you, and appointed you, that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain, that whatever you ask of the Father in My name, He may give to you. 17 This I command you, that you love one another.” (NASB)
Today’s Gospel lesson picks up where last Sunday’s Gospel left off. There Jesus compared our relationship to Him with the relationship between the vine and it’s branches. As a branch cannot produce anything good without being attached to the vine, we cannot produce any good fruit without being graphed into the body of Christ. Without the vine, the branch dies. It is also true that sometimes a branch fails to produce fruit because the branch has already died and needs to be pruned for the sake of the whole plant.
The point of last week’s parable is that Jesus is the Vine and Christians are the branches. Our life is the fruit of Christ’s person and work of His earthly ministry and His work in the Word and Sacrament ministry of the church. Without the preaching and teaching of, the talking about, and the mediating on God’s Word, Christian faith withers and dies.
In last week’s Gospel Jesus said point blank, “As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me. . . apart from Me you can do nothing.”
Today’s assigned reading is a continuation of the Vine and Branches sermon. In it Jesus teaches, “Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in My love. 10 If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments, and abide in His love… 12 This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you.”
The Father loves His Son. The Son abides in the love of His Father. The Son loves His disciples and the disciples are to abide in the love of the Father and the Son. This love is to extend to “one another.” As to the nature of this love, it is of a different nature than the kind of love that comes naturally to human beings.
This kind of love is the self sacrificing love that is only found in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus referred to this kind of love in verse 13. “Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.” 1 John 3:16 describes the love of God in Christ in this way. “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.”
Now as to the context of the Vine and Branches and abiding in the love of Christ, Jesus preached this sermon on the night in which He was betrayed. He was about an hour away from being in the Garden of Gethsemane and mere hours away from being betrayed, beaten, spat upon, and nailed to the cross.
It was in the midst of this Jesus instructs the men who would soon forsake and deny Him to abide in His love and to manifest that love to one another.
10 “If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments, and abide in His love.” The statement sounds like a conditional commandment. “If you do this, then I will love you.” Be like Jesus or else.
But to rightly understand what Jesus is teaching here requires an understanding of four Greek words; the words we translate as “abide,” “commandments,” “love,” and “keep.”
The Greek word “meno” is translated as “abide” in English. The Greek word for abide does not describe an action or activity. “Abide” describes a condition, a state of being.
To “abide” means “to remain stable or fixed in a state, to remain as one, not to become another or different, or to “stand in.” Christians are people who remain in, stand in, and who exist in the condition of trusting in Jesus Christ continually and permanently. Therefore to abide in God’s love is to remain a Christian, to trust in Christ for salvation, to abide in His words, and in His love.
“Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in My love.” There are different words in the Greek for love. agape – unconditional, philia – brotherly love, and sorge – natural affection.
“Agape” love is total, free, unconditional, selfless love. It is a love that transcends circumstance or condition. It is to love in spite of unlovable elements. This kind of love does not issue demands on what a person must do or be or change in order to be loved. This kind of love does not put itself in the middle of the relationship. It is the kind of love that puts self behind the other. It is popular on Mothers’ Day to make the point that the love that good mothers have for their children is a close to agape love we get in this world. “Only a mother could love such a son.” But the point of Scripture is that agape love is found in and flows from Jesus Christ into and through Christians.
Faith, hope, and love are the fruits of the Gospel and as the Scripture teaches, the greatest of these three is “love,” but not for the reason you think. The greatest of the three is love because in the life of the world to come, the other two (faith and hope) pass away. Faith is hope in that which is unseen. In heaven you will see your Lord face to face. You will see a world without sin. Hope is faith pointed toward the future and the unfulfilled promises of Christ. But again once in heaven the future has arrived eternally. There is no need for hope.
Love is the greatest of the three because it does not have an expiration date. Pure love, the Love of Christ that abides and the love that we live in will live on eternally.
Remember when Jesus said, “Abide in My love,” He was speaking about everything that He has done for you in His life, death, resurrection, ascension, and in His church through the means of grace. It is through all of these things that you are placed and kept in His love.
Now to the third word. 1. Abide. 2. Love. 3. Commandment. 10 “If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments, and abide in His love.”
Now I admit in the Gospel lesson and in the 2nd and 3rd verses of the Epistle lesson it sounds like Jesus is issuing a command, that is a statement of pure law: 10 “If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments…”
1 John 5:2-3 “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and observe His commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments; and His commandments are not burdensome.”
The Greek word is “entolas.” When Jesus uses the word it most often encompasses all the words of God. Entolas means “teaching, instruction, or command.” The doctrine, instruction, commands of Jesus comes in two kinds. Commands of Law and commands of Gospel.
Last word– keep. If you “keep” My commandments. It sounds like Jesus is saying, “As long as you obey the rules, you belong to Me.” But “keep” means to “keep hold of.” “Keep” means to preserve, cling to, not let go. We abide in His love by clinging to His doctrine, instruction, and commandments. Simply stated we abide in His love by cling to His Word.
The love that Christ Jesus has for us is not limited and is found and given in His words and deeds. Our Lord’s love for us is so great that the gates of hell cannot prevail against it!
It is into this love that we have been baptized. He speaks these words, not to get us focused on what we need to do in order to be saved, but instead to direct our attention to what He has done in order to save us. When you focus on the doctrine, and instructions of Christ in His Word and on the unconditional love of Christ crucified, you see your fellow human being, regardless of race, lifestyle, economic status, and political orientation as a person for whom Jesus died. John 3:16 “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life.”
Finally, faith, love, joy, hope, and all the fruits of the person and work of Christ are produced by Jesus, His Word, and the Holy Spirit. He makes it clear that we are the fruit of His work and the fruit we bear is His fruit. 16 “You did not choose Me, but I chose you, and appointed you, that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain.”
As St. Paul says to the Galatians, “I have been crucified with Christ (which is what Baptism is). It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” Said another way, “I have been baptized/crucified into Christ. It is no longer I who love, but who Christ who lives and loves within me.”
The love of Christ originates with Christ, comes to us in the Word and Sacrament ministry, is created along the side of faith, and flows through us to our neighbors 1 John 4:19 – “We love, because He first loved us.”
AMEN.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep our minds and hearts in Christ Jesus. Amen.