John 14:15-21
May 1, 2005
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
As the weather gets even better in the Bay Area, this is a season of weddings. As a pastor, I’ve done lots of weddings. You would think that by this time in my ministry, with so many weddings, a wedding would become a commonplace for me. Much of the service is, except for one part. It’s that part of the service where I, on behalf of the church, ask the couple, “John, will you love Susan?” then “Susan, will you love John?”
It’s kind of strange to be asking the couple, “Will you love each other?” You would think that what the church would ask at the wedding is, “John, do you love Susan? Susan, do you love John?” No, it’s “John, will you love Susan?” Love is defined here as an act of the will, a promise, something you decide to do.
This definition of love flies in the face of just about everything we think about love! For us, love is a feeling. We speak about falling in love, as if love is something we stumble upon. Our definition of romantic love is that it’s an unexpected surprise beyond our control and timetable. We say that we can’t command someone to feel love. You just can’t say to someone, “Be happy.” Love is something that just happens.
Orders to Love
But in the strange logic of the gospel, the gospel says that you can command people to love. That’s just what Jesus does in today’s Scriptures. In the 14th chapter of John, Jesus and his disciples are together at the table. Jesus is preparing to leave his disciples to obediently move toward the cross, his supreme act of love. He hints of the fate that awaits him, but he also speaks to them about their fate as his followers. The point of this passage is not so much about Jesus as it is about us.
In speaking about us, Jesus makes a surprising move. “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me.” Jesus links love with obedience. He orders us to love.
But the love that we understand is only a momentary feeling, something that we fall into and out of. But Jesus’ command is for us to love. We are dealing with a countercultural definition of love here. He commands us to love.
One of the dearest passages in the gospel is John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.” Jesus is about to demonstrate the depth of that love by obediently moving toward the cross, loving us even unto death. That’s countercultural. And on the way there, he commands us to love as well.
Jesus says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” This means that when we love Jesus, we would be willing to keep his commandments. Then Jesus says, “Those who keep my commandments are those who love me.” Jesus is also saying that when we follow and keep his commandments, we end up loving him. Either way, Jesus’ linking of command and love puts substance and shape into this rather vague and mushy word, love.
Simple Obligations
Last Sunday when some of you were at the joint 9:30 worship, I spoke about the importance of everyone coming to the church retreat day we had yesterday at the Marin Headlands. After my sermon when I made everyone possible to feel rather obligated to attend, over 30 people signed up! While I don’t like to convey guilt as a motivator, sometimes a little simple obligation is the best thing to remind us of what we are supposed to do. By the way, we had a great time!
Every year when our congregation launches our stewardship canvass, we hear a variety of reasons why people are motivated to give money to the church. Some said that they give out of a sense of gratitude for all the good things that God had given them. Many said that they gave money simply because common sense told them that, if you are going to be a member of an organization, you need to be financially supportive of that organization.
One woman said, “This may sound trite, but I give because I think I’m supposed to. If you are going to be a disciple of Christ, this is what you do. You give. He gave to us. We give to support his work in the world. That’s that.”
I don’t know you but what she said was not trite at all. In a climate where many of us think that it’s insincere to do something unless we really feel like it, it’s refreshing to meet someone who does something because she is “supposed to.” I’m sure that there may be feelings behind her sense of obligation—warm feelings for Jesus and his church—but feelings alone are often rather a thin foundation for a faithful life. Sometimes, the best things we do are out of simple obligations because we are supposed to.
I am reminded of our recently departed church member, Julia Lu who came to church when she was 99 years old. I’m sure that she wasn’t always feeling strong or healthy to come to church. And like all of us, Julia may also have had warm feelings for Jesus and his church to make her way out of her home to come to church. But if you ask her why she comes so faithfully, she would say that since she is a disciple of Jesus, she is supposed to come. Warm feelings sometimes are insufficient to sustain a life time of faithfulness. We need simple obligations to lead us to do the rest.
Contemporary Spirituality
We know that there was a time in our country’s history that slavery was legal. Churches at their revival meetings would sing, “Oh, how I love Jesus! Oh, how I love Jesus! Because he first loved me.” This song was sung in racially segregated churches. We failed to link love with obedience. Love of Jesus was mostly a feeling, a deep religious feeling to be sure, but mostly a feeling, not an act of the will or a mode of obedience. That kind of faith didn’t lead so called, good Christian people to know that slavery was wrong and contrary to Christianity.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sometimes spoke of the “weapon of love.” For King, love was a powerful force, more powerful than the forces of evil and wickedness. That was the only available resource for revolutionary Christians. King practiced nonviolence as an aspect of his weapon of love. King and his followers practiced nonviolence, not because it was effective, but because it was the only means available to him as a Christian. He said, “We will outlove your ability to hate. We will outsuffer your ability to inflict pain.” For King, nonviolence was not only a savvy political strategy for the moment, but nonviolence was the only means of obedient service to Jesus.
I wonder if churches today can launch a nonviolent movement against injustice in the same way that the African American church acted in King’s days. Sadly, we seem to lack the discipline, the obedient determination to love as Jesus lived, to suffer as he suffered, obediently to take up our crosses and follow.
Today we still hear ourselves say in difficult and controversial discussions, “What would Jesus do?” suggesting that some naive, simplistic, and unrealistic answer can be found when in reality, what Jesus would do would be linking obedience to love that is difficult, costly, and demanding. Jesus doesn’t expect simplistic answers to the world’s most challenging problems. He does command us to love and to keep his commandments.
Do you know the main difference between the historic Christian faith that we hold and the contemporary spirituality that’s popular today? It’s this. Much of today’s spirituality is mushy, a projection of some vague religious sentiment. Christianity, on the other hand, is a matter of daily, specific, obedience to Jesus Christ as Lord. Rather than the sum of our highest religious aspirations, Jesus is the one who comes to us, intrudes upon us, and commands us. Contemporary spirituality is too often what we make of it. Christianity is what Jesus makes out of us. He commands us to love.
Deep Long-lasting Love
One of the things that most of us learn in marriage is that love—real, deep, abiding love—is the result of marriage rather than its cause. Strange but true. A couple, standing before God and the church at their wedding, may think that love is the reason for their wedding, the cause of the marriage. They are here, in the church, having a wedding, because they are in love.
But one of the wonders of marriage is that, making and keeping the promise to love one another—for better for worse, in sickness and in health, until death do us part—your love deepens, you become more in love than you were when you began keeping the promises of marriage. You have heard married couples say, “We didn’t know a thing about real love when we got married. We were young and silly. But over the years, we’ve learned what real love is.”
Joy and I have been married for 33 years this August. If love was only a feeling to keep us married over these many years, we wouldn’t be married today. But in marriage, there is a commitment, an obligation, a decision to be together during good times as well as during not as good times, and we discovered that out of these simple obligations, our love grows more deeply. It’s not only a feeling, but a long-lasting, enduring commitment until death do us part.
Through the thick and the thin of marriage, in the struggle to be faithful, love has been the gift of a couple’s fidelity. Thus the church, at a wedding, does not say, “John, do you love Susan?” but rather, “John, will you love Susan,” speaking of love as a conscious decision to follow through on your commitments.
One thing that most of us discover in marriage is that the more you work at keeping the promises, the more faithfully you hold to what you promised to do, the less you have to consciously keep those promises. Fidelity just becomes part of you. You become a faithful person through your faithfulness.
God’s Faithfulness
We have in this passage in John not only the command to love but also the promise of God’s faithfulness to us in the giving of the Holy Spirit. When Jesus returns to be with the Father, we won’t become orphans but rather the Holy Spirit will abide with us and be in us. God’s promise of love will stay with us even “in a while the world will no longer see Jesus.” We will see Jesus for he is in us through the Holy Spirit.
We belong to Jesus, and his Spirit gives us life. This is good news for any of us who find ourselves feeling orphaned.
The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Love. “They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me,” says Jesus to his disciples; “and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.” The love between God and Jesus is never limited to just a divine Father-Son relationship, it spills over into our lives and saturates us with unconditional acceptance and affection and acknowledgement.
Jesus speaks about our obedience to love. The promise today is that if we will dare to keep his commandments, dare to love Jesus by being obedient to Jesus, walking his way, following him faithfully, then we will love him. Our love will grow and deepen as it is tested and proven to be true in life’s daily challenges. If you love me, he says, you will keep my commandments. The converse is also true. Because we keep his commandments, we will love him, as he loves us.
The important thing to keep in mind is that the commandments of Jesus all involve living a life of love. Just a few verses earlier, Jesus says to the disciples, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I loved you, you also should love one another.” (13:34)
When your relationship or marriage is conflicted, love one another. When the medical test is disturbing, love one another. When a family member faces a layoff, love one another. When there’s a death in the family, love one another. When a friend has been rejected, love one another. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples,” says Jesus, “if you have love for one another. Against all of life’s complicated and difficult situations, Jesus calls us to love one another and in time this love begins to transform these difficult times to become good once again.
Love is not some mushy vague kind of feeling after all. Love commanded by Jesus calls us to obediently follow Jesus to bring love and justice in the world. Jesus’ love for us is not to make us feel good. But out of following through with our simple obligations we grow to know what this love is. Inasmuch as Jesus obediently moved toward the cross out of his sacrificial love for us, he orders us to love. And when we love, we follow his commandments.
Let us pray.
Gracious Lord God, continue to teach us to love one another and the whole world because you first loved us. Reveal to us through the Holy Spirit that love is not an option for Christians or that it’s a feeling that we have with only our friends, but that just as your love challenged and questioned the barriers that stop people from loving each other, let our love go beyond these familiar and comfortable walls to love the world that is hungering for your love for peace and justice. We pray in the name of your loving son, Jesus Christ. Amen.