Loving "on command" - Kyle Matthew Oliver

(Acts 10:44-48; Psalm 98; 1 John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17)

In chapter 14 of John’s gospel, Jesus says these familiar words: “If ye love me, keep my commandments.” That’s a pretty tall order, no? Kind of a lot of pressure?

It gets even more incredible when we arrive at today’s elaboration on what those commandments actually are. Here in this morning’s passage, Jesus gets to the point: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”

Oh is that all?

Actually no. Jesus continues, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

Those are some seriously high expectations. If Jesus is the example we’re shooting for, we seem doomed to fail. And yet that is his commandment to us.

How can we think differently about texts that can seem so unrealistic? How can we make sense of the idea of loving “on command”?

Those of you who came to the rector’s forum on Anglican thought a few weeks ago know I have a fondness for Richard Hooker, arguably the first great Anglican theologian. Hooker has a helpful perspective here, because he sees law and commandment as an especially suitable metaphor for God.

The created order is held in being according to law, says Hooker. Here’s the line from his masterwork that interprets everything that follows: “[t]he being of God is a kinde of lawe to his working: for that perfection which God is, geveth perfection to that he doth” (Lawes I.2.1). Boy is that an Elizabethan mouthful. Here’s the gist:

Hooker says that what God is, who God is, is reflected throughout the great chain of being: angels, humans, animals, plants, rocks, seas, everything. God’s law connects God’s works one to the other and carries God’s perfection to them. God is a sort of wellspring of order, structure, right relationship.

So we do not so much comply with the law or obey the commandment to love one another. Notice that in the language of our gospel reading we keep the commandments, we abide in God’s love.

This is language of reception: love is a gift. It comes to us and to all creation from our Creator.

This is language of participation: to love is simply to get swept up by God’s love, be pulled along by it, become woven into its very fabric—and it into ours.

Here the familiar words of the King James Version serve us poorly, hiding the meaning John seems to be getting at. “If ye love me, keep my commandments” is not supposed to be a threat or a guilt trip or even a challenge.

It’s a promise: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments, it will just sort of follow.” That’s better but still imperfect.

What’s the alternative? Well, I don’t know, and I think that’s why these writings of John’s community (the gospel and the letters) are so circular and repetitive. There’s always more to say. We can never quite capture it.

For my part, I’d want to put it this way: Loving Christ and keeping his commandments are the same thing.

Loving one another as God has loved us is less a matter of imitation or even grateful response than it is of recognizing God, assenting to Christ’s presence in us. I appreciate Henri Nouwen’s point that God’s love is the first love and we share and return our own. But I think it’s better to say that there is only one love. It is of God and is God. We do best to notice it with gratitude and let it do its work in us.

We are included in a community of love, of obedience to this commandment in the fullest and deepest sense, when we receive the gift of the Spirit and become one with the Savior who is law and love already for us and in us.

OK, we need to bring this conversation with scripture out of the stratosphere. Let’s make it a bit more concrete by considering, I presume, an all too familiar example.

Let’s think about our overbearing coworker, or our unpleasant relative, or someone who simply gets our goat on a regular basis.

Knowing that love for such people is, shall we say, elusive, we tend to focus on “loving actions.” We can do our best to relate well, putting our frustrations aside and focusing on the task at hand in those times we need to be together. We can go out of our way to practice kindness, smiling, doing favors, remaining open, and essentially pretending we love this person until it sort of becomes a habit and sticks.

I’m a huge proponent of this approach. But there are certain folks for whom we just can’t get it off the ground, people with whom we’re so defensive or uncomfortable or outright hostile that the very thought of “fake it ‘til you make it” love seems almost laughable.

This is when I try to take my shortcoming to God in prayer, abandoning “loving action” to grasp at “loving response”: “Oh God, you have showered me with so many blessings, forgiven me so many evils, loved me so totally and completely. Help me to extend just a fraction of that generosity toward this insufferable human being …”

You probably see where I’m going here. If the love depends on us, there are always going to be people with whom we come up short. No amount of meditation on the sufferings of Christ or the unshakable faithfulness of the God of our ancestors seems to get us over the hump.

Sometimes, the best thing we can do to love someone is admit to God that we can’t. Sometimes, maybe more often than we think, our prayer should be something like this:

“God, I do not know how to love John in accounting, or cousin Sally, or that neighbor whose dog always poops in my yard. It is beyond me. But I know it is not beyond you. I know you already have a love for this person that is vast, complete, and unconditional. When it is time, please share it with me.”

For my money, that’s the only prayer that has a chance with the people who drive us nuts, to say nothing of those who have hurt or abused us.

Jesus’s commandment that we love one another only makes sense when we accept that the love of God and neighbor is a gift of grace. It is already present in and through the created order, in which we are all interconnected. It is already present by the Word of God, Christ who is all and in all. It is already present by the power of the Holy Spirit, Christ’s own first gift for those who believe.

The love of God is already in us. We keep the commandment of Christ by giving ourselves over to it as best we can, as often as we can.

Image credit: “if ye love me” by Tom Woodward via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)