Love one another.

Friday of the

Fifth Week of Easter

May 15th

READING: John 15: 12-17

“This is my commandment, 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. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.”

~~~

New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Catholic Edition, copyright © 1989, 1993, 1995 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

REFLECTION

The context of this famous saying of Jesus is, remember, the context of “remain.” It’s really not that hard, is it? Love one another. Except that it is so hard. Loving another. Being loved. The divorce rate reminds us that married love has a growing fallout (to which my own track record, as many will know, has contributed). But other forms of love, too. Having studied conflict resolution, I am painfully aware how the love of families disintegrates into the pay cheques of lawyers and (less expensive) mediators. Employers, neighbours, church members. There’s an awful lot of unlove.

This passage is much cited in the context of war. Rightly so. We are all painfully aware of the sacrifice made by those who died in various wars that have given us the freedom to live as we do. Every day on my dog walk I walk through a cemetery and past a war memorial, and my heart crumples at the young lives lost. On many days my music shuffle returns to Redgum’s heart-tearing “I was Only 19.” It is a song of an imagined survivor, for there is more than one way to die: 

... can you tell me, doctor, why I still can’t get to sleep?

And night time’s just a jungle dark and a barking M16?

And what’s this rash that comes and goes

Can you tell me what it means?

God help me - I was only nineteen.

It isn’t only the dead who lay down (and lose) their life in war. Survivors and their families do as well. “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

These sayings of Jesus incorporate the horrors of human existence – (and God know we think of and pray for those who have laid down their lives in the war on Covid-19) – but they are about more than only war (as if war – and war on a virus – were an “only”). But Jesus weaves together the outcome: love, with the recipe: remain. And, while these are not statements about the ins and outs of eternity (whatever that is, remember), they are a demand for disciplined effort, of which most of us fall short, and for which we must turn and turn again to the Spirit who advocates and guides and comforts … “Holy Spirit, come.”