The final point of having a living relationship with God is the joy of living. Yes, the narrow way is long and at times scary and arduous, but the final point of it all is joy.
Jesus said this to his disciples the night before he was crucified: “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.”
There’s a Greek word that appears a lot in this passage. “‘ina” basically means “in order that something or someone may”. The next line is famous, but mistranslated, really. Not “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you,” but “This is my commandment, in order that you may love one another as I have loved you.”
The commandment he’s referring to goes back to vine metaphor Jesus used in the passage immediately prior, which we heard last week. He describes himself as a vine, and God as the one who tends the branches, so that they might bear fruit. I talked about Jesus as providing the sap in the branch, the nutrients it needs to germinate its fruit, and I said that the wisdom and power to know and do God’s will was in that sap.
But the metaphor is both abandoned and explained, when Jesus plainly says, “Abide in my love.” To be connected to the vine of Christ in a fruitful way is to abide in Jesus’ love, and bear the fruit of that love.
This “‘ina” is important. Throughout this passage Jesus is basically saying that his disciples do not have it in them to bear the fruit of genuine love for God and neighbor by their own force of will. And most importantly, they will not therefore know the joy that is the point of the whole thing.
We need to remember how this whole discourse began. Way back at 13:1, John writes: “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” And Jesus went on to wash his disciples feet, instructing them to do the same for others, a gesture that recalls Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 20:26: “…whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave…”
He goes on to comfort them with the promise of the Holy Spirit. We’re heard the passage about his being the good shepherd, also in this discourse.
But last commandment before his crucifixion, was to “Abide in his love.” As the Father loved him, Jesus says, so he loved his disciples. Jesus is about to lay down his life for his disciples; this is what he means by the love with which his Father loved him.
The Father gave Jesus his own eternal life. He gave it freely and completely, and he gave Jesus the mission to show others how to receive that same gift, and of course the great mystery at the heart of our faith is that we receive the gift of eternal life by giving our lives away away, just as Jesus did.
God is love, John declares. And love is God pouring out his life for his beloved creation. In some way, Jesus opened himself to this love by becoming its conduit to others.
My old friend and colleague Bill Denton frequently mentioned that Greek has many different words for love, and English has only one. Agape is the highest form, more a decisive action than a feeling. It is the free choice to give one’s life up for the well-being of the other.
Eros is romantic love, also good and God-given, how we get all those babies, you know, but it is more a feeling, and largely involuntary. Yet every married couple on their wedding day describe agape in their unconditional vows of faithfulness to each other. But agape itself is the action of carrying out their promises, particularly when it is hard. Romantic love may come and go in any marriage, but the rest of the time, a couple lives on agape, that decision to faithfully love the other.
Of course, the most powerful version of agape most people experience is parental love. Biology plays a big part in that too. A lot of our feelings for our children are instinctual programming. Like romantic love, they are largely involuntary. But all otherwise healthy parents also make a conscious decision to agape love their kid no matter what, a decision that is particularly important during those teenage years, when the kids are sometimes less than lovable.
Usually, though, we love those who love us. We like those who are like us. And if we are truthful, there are people we don’t like and maybe even people we really hate. Jesus says that if we are like this, our discipleship to him means nothing. 1 John says it loud and clear: we can’t love God and hate our neighbor. The two actions are inseparable, one in the same love.
God doesn’t love us because we love him. He doesn’t like us because we’re like him. He doesn’t love us because we’ve done anything to deserve it. He doesn’t love us because we hate people he supposedly hates. He loves us because he is love, poured out as a freely given gift.
His loving desire is to fill us with his joy. I think for a lot of people that sounds a little scary. They wonder what their friends would think if they were suddenly irrepressibly joyful. We’ve all been around people who seem a little too gleeful all the time. It can be a little creepy.
But a lot of people in this room know that the joy God wants to give us is deeper and more lovely than that. It is the simple joy of being alive forever, right this minute. It is the sense that whatever comes along, it’s just part of the glorious thrill ride of life God has given us, and don’t worry, we all end up safe at home in the end.
The pain and suffering along the narrow way to the kingdom of heaven is all about resistance. We resist accepting reality and our mission within it, because it is not the happiness we ordered. Jesus tells the parable about the people too busy to go to the king’s son’s wedding feast. Sorry, I’ll take a rain check on indescribable joy, because I’m busy today executing my own plan.
The joy of resurrection life, as I’m calling it, is in part the sheer relief of throwing in the towel and saying, “I give up on my own plan, I’m deciding to give up on hating and disliking and negatively judging. I’m deciding to just love God and everybody else, no matter what. I’ve decided to welcome life and my part in it, no matter what comes along, good or bad, happy or sad.
Great to make such a decision, difficult to act on it. But everything Jesus said and did is our guide to receiving a greater love, not our own, a love that empowered Jesus to love as no one ever had before, the same love that empowers us to love as we could never love by our own will alone.
We don’t get to heaven by our works; we get to heaven by making an authentic decision to love God and neighbor, as Jesus teaches. It doesn’t matter whether we’re successful. Salvation isn’t about what we do, it’s about what we’re aiming at when we do anything.
There’s an old story from Islam about the ant on his way to Mecca. Another pilgrim strides by, notices the ant and asks him how he expects to ever get to Mecca with his tiny legs? The ant replies, “I may not get there, but I’ll die on the way.”
All of us here are on the same pilgrimage, and the farther along any of us get, the more compassion we have for those who are struggling, for we know how strangely hard it is to accept the love of God.
We’re all aiming at that joy, and many here have tasted it. It is that sense that in this moment, I am exactly where I am supposed to be, and whatever is on my plate, bitter or sweet, is just another course in the feast, and my job is to trust that it is exactly the nutrition I need to more bountifully bear the fruit of God’s indiscriminate love.
God will certainly lead me where my own plan would never have taken me, as Jesus promises Peter after the resurrection. The evolution of a believer is like the difference between being young and being old. When you’re young, you can wear what you want and go wherever you want; but when you’re old, someone else dresses you, and you are led where you do not wish to go.
It sounds like a warning, but it is a metaphor for the difference between the immature Peter who followed his own will, and the spiritually mature Peter, whom God will now lead where immature Peter most certainly would not have chosen to go himself.
Just as by ourselves we cannot love as God loves, so by ourselves we cannot have the joy of God. But by deciding to love God, we decide to love our neighbors too, and in sharing that love, we will find that joy.
Amen.
—Sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, John 15:9-17.
