The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
The assigned Gospel lesson this morning is from the middle of a farewell sermon preached by Jesus to His disciples. The farewell sermon began in John 13 and runs all the way through the end of John 17. The fact that these words are the last recorded long sermon that Jesus spoke prior to His passion during Holy Week should add a significant sobriety to what Jesus said here. In just a few hours after He’s done with this sermon, this discourse on love, He will be arrested. He will be abused, betrayed, abandoned, unlawfully arrested, given a sham trial, and executed by crucifixion. He will experience the exact opposite of everything that love is and love does. He will experience the full hate of the devil, the world, and even our own sinful natures. Yet Jesus speaks of His and His Father’s love for one another in the midst of this oncoming onslaught of hate.
The emphasis is on love, and it’s especially noticeable by the use of the Greek noun four times in just a couple of verses, agape, and the noun used four or five times as a verb in the same passage. In last Sunday’s sermon, the Gospel lesson, Jesus spoke about His relationship with His disciples by using the analogy of vines and branches. He is the vine and we are the branches. The point of the analogy is that the branches cannot live unless they’re connected to the vine, and without the vine, the branches cannot only not bear good fruit, they simply cannot survive. They wither away and they die.
In today’s text, Jesus draws our attention to one of the chief benefits, virtues of the Christian faith, the Christian religion: namely, love. Now this love that Jesus speaks of in the text this morning is not the run-of-the-mill human type of love that human beings have for one another. It is the well-known and famous agape type love. That is a love for human beings that is unconditional. God loves that which He also hates, that is, namely, the sinner and the sin that He hates. Love, this kind of love, is divine. It has its origin in God Himself and is given to us and through us to other people, especially when we make use of the means of grace. Paul wrote in Galatians 5:6: “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love.” Thus Christian faith and love are intertwined, one with the other. The one brings the other and leads back to the former.
This morning’s Gospel lesson began with John 15:9. There we read: “Just as the Father has loved me, I have also loved you. Abide in my love. 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.” In this reading, Jesus gives us a series of commands concerning love and our connectedness to Him. Right in verse 9, He commands: abide in my love. To abide in Jesus’ love is to abide also in faith in Him, and in trust of what He does, and in belief and taking hold of His doctrines, of that which He preaches and He teaches, as well as what He does. In verse 10 He says: keep my commandments. In verse 12: love one another. In verse 16: go and bear good fruit. “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love,” verse 10. One cannot do both: one cannot abide in the commandments and in Christ’s love and continue lifestyles that are contrary to both the commandments and to Christ’s love.
Jesus reinforces the relationship between faith and love, God and His children, in one of His epistles, 1 John 5:2-3. There John was given to write: “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome.” When Jesus was asked what were the greatest of the commandments in the Torah, the books of the Old Testament, He said: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” That is, fundamentally, when you boil down the message of every single prophet in the Old Testament, it’s about the love of God and the fulfillment of the commandments in the forthcoming promised Messiah.
So whether the topic is our relationship to God or to fellow human beings, love is supposed to be the foundational disposition that we have both toward God and toward our neighbor. But because we are all sinful and unclean, and we break these two commandments constantly, as we do other commandments, how is it possible then to abide in the love and keep His commandments and do what is pleasing to God? How can we abide in love if our connection to our faith in and our understanding of Jesus Christ is weak or non-existent? We know that we cannot love others as Christ loved us. His love was a perfect love, the perfect agape love, perfect in every way, and yet we are imperfect in every way.
We also live in a world where we’ve taught generations to think of themselves first, to love themselves, to take care of themselves. They call it self-love in psychology now: to love themselves and take care of themselves first, to look out for number one, and everybody else second, third, or fourth. That’s the generation in which we now find ourselves. But apart from faith in Christ, we are all spiritually dead, spiritually blind, enemies of God. We are, in fact, people who love ourselves more than we love God, and especially more than we love our neighbors. We all inherited this sinful nature from Adam and Eve. It’s called original sin. We are guilty, as the general confession says each and every Sunday, and we deserve, for our selfishness and our lovelessness, temporal and eternal punishment. We have failed to keep the commandments, to love God above all else and to love neighbor as ourselves.
You can’t be a disciple, or in the language of Jesus in the Gospel lesson, you can’t be a friend of Christ, without being under the teaching, the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Love and faithfulness go together. “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” That’s the kind of love that we’re to have. “If anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.” The idea of caring for others before caring for oneself is a message that’s been abandoned by the modern world, including the modern church. America has become a rather mean-spirited place.
Consider the sad case of Megan Meier. Megan was three weeks short of her 14th birthday when a mother of one of her classmates got on MySpace, a now-defunct social media site, and began to bully and cyberbully and harass this young 13-year-old, to the point where the 13-year-old, being consumed by the internet world, thought that’s all that existed was the internet world, and thus at the age of 13 committed suicide. We’re seeing an increase in the number of examples, almost nightly on the news, of mean-spiritedness and cruelty. Just look at what’s taking place at America’s premier colleges and universities. They’ve sowed hate and division, and now they’re reaping what they sow. Hate-filled activists destroy everyone and everything in their path. Protests against that which is good and right, in favor of that which is evil, is now commonplace. Then there’s school shootings, bullying face to face or on social media, just plain old rudeness from customer service representatives who are supposed to be there to actually help you. You’ve dealt with mean-spirited people in your own life, and to be honest, sometimes you and I come off rather mean-spirited and impatient, even though we may not have intended it.
In the midst of all this mean-spiritedness, Jesus says to Christians and to the church: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” Jesus creates His followers to be a different kind of people in this world and from this world, even as we have to deal with troublesome people. Jesus wants His church to be a different kind of place from all the other places that you’ll find on the planet. The church should be looked at differently, because it acts and believes differently than the world. The church should be different: kinder, gentler, more forgiving, more caring, and more loving of its own members, and yes, of its own community and its neighbors.
Now when some disciples began to hear this message of unconditional love, they realized they had a problem. They couldn’t live up to the commandments to love God with all their heart and all their soul and all their mind, and to love their neighbors as themselves. So they attempted to lighten the load by narrowing the definition of who a neighbor is. One disciple asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” And Jesus replied with the parable of the Good Samaritan. And as it turned out, everyone, especially people in need, are our neighbors. So much for lightening the load.
People often appeal to the so-called Golden Rule of Matthew 7:12, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” But the axiom we are given today in the Gospel lesson requires more than that axiom. It’s a higher axiom. Here He commands us to love one another as He loves us. That’s a tall order, for His love is perfect and ours not so much. We all know how God loved us: “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” The Epistle of 1 John has another version, 3:16: “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.” We know love by this: that our Lord bled, suffered, and died, was crucified for our sins and for the sins of the whole world, that we would receive His obedience to all the commandments and the will and way of His Father. That is, that what He perfected, He wraps us in, wraps us in His righteous robe, so that God the Father sees us as holy and innocent children of the heavenly kingdom.
We can’t get away from the commandment to love as God loved us. And to the natural ear, that sounds like works righteousness: we have to love first, and then God will love us back. But that’s not how God established the system. We are incapable of love until He loves us and adopts us in Jesus Christ. In John 6, Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God in flesh. Jesus immediately takes Peter to where that confession came from. Namely, He says, “Did I not choose you, the twelve?” To divest them immediately of any thought that they chose Christ. Christ makes it clear He chose them out of pure love for them. And then He adds a little dig about Judas: “Did I not choose you, the twelve? And yet one of you is a devil.” Think about that for a second. Jesus not only chose the eleven whom He knew would remain faithful ultimately, Jesus chose the betrayer, the one who was possessed of the devil, Judas Iscariot. Why? Because Jesus’ love covers a multitude of sins, of all sins. He even loves people who live in open rebellion to Him. That’s a different kind of love than the world practices.
John 15:19: “If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.” The love of God is from God, given in the person and work of Jesus Christ, delivered through the means of grace, of the preached Word, the baptized Word, and the body and blood of Jesus Christ on the altar. That love exists alongside a sinful, worldly love that we inherited with our old sinful nature.
Now this was a very big issue in the Reformation. Faith and good works and charitable works and works of love were elevated to meritorious status. That is, people had to do them in order to earn God’s love and favor. And to this, both in the 95 Theses and in the Heidelberg Disputation, right at the get-go of the Reformation, Luther drives a stake through the heart of works righteousness and this idea of love. In the Heidelberg Disputation, April 26, 1518, Luther presented 28 propositions for a theological debate. In the last thesis, number 28, Luther distinguished between the way in which the world loves something and the way in which God loves us: “The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it. The love of man comes into being through that which is pleasing to it.”
God doesn’t love you because you were lovable. He doesn’t love me because I’m lovable. God loves you because that’s what the love of God does: it creates in you a new nature, perfect and holy and righteous in the image of Christ, and that is whom God the Father loves. God doesn’t love us because we somehow can become lovable creatures. He has to create something that wasn’t there at all in the first place. In his commentary on that 28th thesis, Luther wrote: “The love of God, which lives in man, loves sinners, evil persons, fools, and weaklings in order to make them righteous, good, wise, and strong.” That is, God loves us sinners so that God can create in us a new nature, and thus we become good children of the heavenly Father. “Rather than seeking its own good,” Luther continued, “the love of God flows forth and bestows good.” Rather than finding it, seeking it, trying to see where it might be hidden in the earth and in the world, God simply goes about making the good thing, the thing that He wants. Therefore sinners are attractive because they are loved; they are not loved by God because they are attractive.
And that brings us back to the vine and the branches and the fruit. Abiding in the commandments is the same thing as believing and trusting in Jesus Christ for one’s salvation. He fulfills all the commandments on our behalf, perfectly, and in our stead. In the language of Scripture, abiding in the love and the commandments of God is the same thing as living and believing in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Whenever a Christian trusts in Christ as his or her Savior, he or she keeps the commandments, and thus automatically abides in the love of Christ. “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love,” Jesus said. The second part of the statement is nearly a natural consequence of the first part of the statement.
Finally, one theologian wrote: this new nature within us finds only that it’s glad for its neighbor. The forgiveness of sins is given through the Gospel, and with it life and salvation. There is nothing more delightful and lovable on earth than one’s neighbor. Love does not think about doing works. It finds joy in people. And when something good is done for others, that something good doesn’t appear as a work of law, but simply as gifts which flow from love. Love never does something because it has to. Love always does something because it wants to.
One final quote from Luther: “Faith is a divine work in us. It changes us and makes us to be born anew of God. It kills the old Adam and makes altogether different men, in heart and spirit and mind and powers, and it brings with it the Holy Spirit. Oh, it is a living, busy, active, mighty thing, this faith, and so it is impossible for it not to do good works.” That’s the fruit on the branches, when the branches are connected to the vine. It simply happens, because it’s His nature, it’s our new nature. Your sins are forgiven, and you have this new nature. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.