A NEW COMMANDMENT

Reading: Acts 9:1-6, (7-20), Psalm 139:1-14, Revelation 5:11-14, John 13:31-35
Preached at First Presbyterian Church, Baldwin, NY on May 8th 2011

A printable PDF copy can be found here

Today is Mother's Day. Seemed like a good day for thinking about the nature of the most mysterious gift life offers to us, the one that many of us first experienced through our parents, the gift of love.

Our reading today gave us these words; Jesus says "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."

This verse places before us three ideas about love.

Firstly; Loving each other is always new!

Inviting people to love one another really wasn’t a particularly revolutionary or even a new idea. Yet it seems every generation has a moment when they rediscover love. From the flower power hippies of the nineteen-sixties to the tunes playing in our teen’s headsets, words about love flow back and forth. But the love that Jesus speaks of is neither the romantic love of attraction or even the affectionate love shared in family life, but love defined by the Greek word – agapé.

‘Agapé’ love is love defined by self-giving. It is an action, not an emotion. You can’t dictate emotions. You only command actions. You cannot force a family to get along with one another. You cannot instruct a person to fall head over heels in romantic love with somebody else. Those sorts of love don’t work like that!

The new commandment of Jesus is not an invitation to wax lyrical about moonlight encounters or family life but is a call to action. That to be followers of Jesus Christ we are invited to choose to live in a way that counts others needs and aspirations as equally significant as our own. Love that is not all about us, but about all of us.

Many of us have seen a glimpse of the ‘agapé’ kind of love in our mothers (and fathers) or whoever brought us up. In retrospect we see how they sacrificed so that their children could have greater opportunities then they themselves ever enjoyed. As I think about the difficult times my own parents faced, particularly during the conflict of the second world war and the bleak years that came afterwards, I realize how much they sacrificed so that myself and my brother and sister could do things my parents could only dream of.

Jesus says, ‘A new commandment’ I give to you. But it wasn’t so much ‘new’ as ‘renewed’ and ‘refocused’. The Israelites had always been taught that to love God was of utmost importance. Likewise, the love of their neighbor was at the root of their system of both law and religion.

Jesus recasts the command, as though this were the latest edition or newest release and He declares ‘A new commandment I give you. That you love one another”. Self-giving love is always renewing love. Active ‘agapé’ love is a force that revitalizes and changes and creates new opportunity and new hope where previously there was hopelessness or despair.

As though anticipating that we will ask, “Well what does this kind of love look like? How can we follow this command to love when we have no example to follow?” the next part of our verses declares; ‘Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.’

2 We are called to love because we are loved

Christian love is response to the love of Jesus Christ. It is not love that seeks to gain anything or win any favor from God, but love that flows from the knowledge of what God has done for us, in and through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. God does not say, “If you just love me enough, I’ll bless your life”. Rather, through Jesus Christ, God declares “You are loved! You are blessed! You are my precious children!”

One of the most profound descriptions of the Christian understanding of God is given in 1 John 4:8. Three simple words. ‘God is love’. And the word used for ‘love’ is again “Agapé” self-giving, outpouring, love. Love that seeks the absolute best of the other. Love that never gives up or ever dies.

One of my favorite Bible commentators of old, Matthew Henry comments; ‘God is the fountain, author, parent, and commander of love; it is the sum of God’s law and gospel: And every one that loves… is born of God, The Spirit of God is the Spirit of love.”

Knowing that we are loved is such a tremendously empowering and freeing thing! Understanding that the love of God is nothing that we have to earn or qualify for but that it is the nature of God to claim us as God’s own, no matter what and no matter ‘who’, can revolutionize our spiritual life.

Some of us were blessed with mothers whom we knew just loved us because we were their children, because we were their offspring, their labor of love! And nothing could change that, even though we knew, at times, we must have nearly broken their hearts and caused them many sleepless nights and many prayers. They just carried on loving us and caring for us and wanting the best for us!

Such is the nature of love that God has towards us. Never gives up on us. Claims us as beloved children. Not because of who we are, but because God is ‘agapé’; God is self giving, self-abandoning love.

Lest we wonder how far that love is prepared to go, we need look no further than the Cross. At the Cross, God declares that whatever God-forsaken experience life may drag us through, God will go there for us and with us.

In Christ God takes our sins, our pains, our fears, all the hell of life, into His heart. Then through the light of resurrection God bathes the Cross in glory and declares, ‘See? Nothing can you take you from my love. Now go change the world!

Which brings us to the final part of this verse “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."

3 Love is our primary way of demonstrating discipleship.

One of the joys for myself of belonging to the Long Island Presbytery is a small but committed book study group that meet occasionally to study together a book by author Brian Mclaren titled ‘A New Kind of Christianity’. In a chapter titled ‘What do we do about the church?” he ask what the churches main task should be and comes to a very basic conclusion.

He writes, “Of many possible answers, there is one to which I am continually drawn, embarrassingly obvious and simple to understand, but also embarrassingly challenging to do; the church exists to form Christlike people, people of Christlike love. It exists to save them from the great danger of wasting their lives, becoming something less than and other than they were intended to be, gaining the world but losing their souls.”

The purpose of the church is not to fill pews, create programs or moderate in matters or morality but to nurture lovers! Lovers who have the ‘agapé’ love capacity of wonderful mothers.

The reverse of that is of course to say that unless we dedicate ourselves to the pursuit of ‘agapé’ love then nobody is going to know that we are disciples and nothing is going to change. It’s just going to be the same old, same old.

That’s why we began today be considering that love, though nothing new, is always new, always fresh, always refocusing our lives and recreating opportunity. Such is the work of God in our midst. A refreshing wind. A ray of light. A beam of hope. Something that reminds us that because we are loved, so, in the security of Jesus love, we can discover the passion for loving others.

It is the work of God’s Spirit to both open up our hearts to the need of Jesus love, and to fill us with the presence of His love. It is not possible to obey the command of God to love others unless we allow ourselves to be loved by God. We learn to love in relationship. It is those who experience love who learn to pass it along.

On this Mothers Day as we celebrate love that has blessed us and formed our lives, I offer you again these words of Jesus; "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."

May God enable us all to grow deeper in both our experience and practice of love. Amen.