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Sixth Sunday of Easter

John 15
9 “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. 10 If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. 11 I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command. 15 I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. 16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. 17 This is my command: Love each other.


Three things left for today: preach a sermon, pray, and then...the third thing...coffee with Team May!

Don’t you hate it when that happens? Gov. Rick Perry does, the presidential candidate who tried to recall the three government agencies he would eliminate upon taking office: “Commerce, Education and...the ah...”

It happens to all of us. But some have handy solutions. Sarah Palin, for example, famously wrote three points on her hand: ‘Energy, tax cuts, and lift the American spirit.’ Ironically, the third thing Rick Perry was trying to remember was the Energy Department, which was somehow written on Sarah Palin’s hand instead.

Then people mocked her, which seems unfair. Writing on your hand to remember something is as old as pens or hands, and I expect all of us have done it. Maybe you have something written on your hand right now. “Go to coffee, see what Team May can do.”

The mocking involved the need to write down the three most important points she wanted to make—her three themes—and the suggestion that if you are truly committed to these themes there would be no need to write them down. She had no real response, but she could have said public speaking isn’t as easy as it looks. Instead she took a jab at the president and called her hand ‘the poor man’s teleprompter’ and later suggested—quoting Isaiah 49.16—that God writes important notes on the divine hand. Very clever, appeals to the base.

Obviously, I watch/listen to too much American electoral politics, but it is endlessly fascinating. And with 2016 right around the corner, it will only get more intense.

I share all this because my reading of John’s ‘love command’ and surrounding instructions reads like something a poorly paid scribe might cobble together. Notice how Jenny’s reading made to seem seamless, but it is anything but. The passage begins well, then something happens:

“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.”

So far so good. Remaining in the love of Jesus will bring you great joy. Our scribal friend remembered a unit of instruction in it’s entirety, and it makes perfect sense. But having made such a good start, this person practiced in the art of listening and transcribing seems to hit a bump in the road. The next unit of the passage seems very different:

My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command.

This is actually three different points, three sermons, maybe given on three different days. Maybe I’m being harsh, and maybe (you’re thinking) I should try listening in the hot sun all day long and then rush home to record the good stuff before it fades from memory completely. And that’s fair enough. I can use my Sharpie, cover a hand and an arm, and this scribe could not. There were no ancient Sharpies.

But listen again, and I think you will agree:

My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.
Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
You are my friends if you do what I command.

The first command flows directly from the summary beginning, the command to ‘remain in my love.’ Love each other as I have love you dovetails nicely with the Golden Rule (‘do unto others...’) and it looks forward to that moment when Jesus will be with them no longer, which is the main theme of the season of Easter.

The second command (‘Greater live has no one’) seems to take us to another place altogether, back to Holy Week perhaps, and the abiding sense that what is coming is the ultimate act of love: ‘to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.’ It fits in the general heading of the love we ought to practice, but it departs from the seasonal theme of remaining together that your joy may be complete.

And the third point, I’m not sure where that fits at all. “You are my friends if you do what I command” is the kind of thing my daughter and her little friends would say in the daycare yard. I know I’m risking a lightning bolt here, and I believe that Jesus said just such a thing, but I’m just not sure he said it here. Jesus had all sorts of friends who didn’t do what he commanded, including the tax collectors and sinners that he counted as friends.

And this is precisely the problem of remembering. You cobble together things that sound similar, you present then in a way that seems to make sense, and some times it just doesn’t work. Jesus spoke all day every day for at least three years, teaching and preaching to people with hungry hearts and itchy ears, and it makes sense that the record that we receive might be a bit of a jumble.

Now, having given you some classic textual criticism, the mainstay of every liberal seminary education, I think we need to step back, and take another look. Maybe it’s not so much a ‘jumble to pick apart’ as a challenge to reassemble. What if the challenge before me (and you) is to weave these three misremembered passages back together into something as coherent as the opening paragraph of the passage? Where would it lead?

First, we recall that that the passage itself, while appearing in the run-up to Pentecost, actually belongs to the run-up to Good Friday and Easter Sunday. So perhaps we need to set aside the seasonal impulse and simply let the passage remain where it belongs. Taking us back to Holy Week means that the words exist in the shadow of the cross, the very location that may reveal meaning. So listen again, but this time we will reinforce the proper context by adding a word or two:

My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you (on the cross).
Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends (on the cross).
You are my friends if you do what I command (on the cross).

Suddenly they fit. Even the awkward final command fits, so let me say more. To love each other as Jesus loved us (on the cross) takes us to the ‘good thief’ who came to understand that Jesus would not try to cheat death, and then said ‘Jesus, remember me, when you come into your Kingdom’ (Luke 23.42). And it takes us to what ought to be regarded as the first Mother’s Day when Jesus commends his mother to the care of the beloved disciple (John 19.26). It explains what St. Paul meant when he said ‘I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me’ (Galatians 2.20). An instrument of death became a source of life as ‘no greater love’ was shown that day.

Finally, ‘You are my friends if you do what I command (on the cross)’ brings us to something that William Countryman said and I frequently quote near the beginning of our service: ‘What God says to you in Jesus is this: You are forgiven. Nothing more. Nothing less.
This is the message Jesus spoke and lived.’ I say it as an assurance of pardon, but it’s really a window on the entire Gospel.

Countryman argues that we can’t simply talk about love—we need to do it in the context of forgiveness. Love, he says, is a fine concept, and worthy of the place we give it, but it can mean many things. It can be extravagant and freely given, but it can also be conditional, and quickly withdrawn. But the love that forgives, the love that reconciles and makes new—that is love we receive from the cross. ‘You are my friends if you do what I command (on the cross) makes sense, because the last word spoken was from the cross was ‘forgive.’

Back to the beginning for a moment, and the best response to Sarah Palin came from Robert Gibbs, White House Spokesman, who a day or two later wrote on his hand ‘eggs and milk’ (to make his son pancakes) and the other two things he didn’t want to forget: ‘hope and change.’ Maybe we can take a page from all this hand-writing and make our own list: ‘love, forgiveness, reconciliation,’ or just draw a cross, which gives us all three. Amen.

posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 6:04 AM