John 15:9-17
“Greatest Love”
August 2, 2020 – Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
In an ancient Greek story, a man name Pythias was traveling in the region called Syracuse. He was accused of treason by the tyrannical ruler there and sentenced to death. So that Pythias could go home one last time and settle his affairs, his friend Damon offered to take his place as a hostage until Pythias returned. The tyrant agreed, on the condition that Damon would be executed if Pythias did come back. The deadline came and Pythias was not there.
Just as the executioner was about to kill Damon, Pythias came running in. He explained that on the way back his ship was attacked by pirates and he had to jump overboard and swim to shore. The king was so impressed by the men’s friendship that he let them both go.
The human storybook is full of tales like Damon and Pythias. We are touched and moved by the sacrifices friends, spouses, parents and children make for each other. It is profound to hear about those willing to give their own lives or safety for those they love. Whether it is a soldier falling on a grenade to protect his comrades or a sister giving up a kidney for her brother, these stories reach down deep into our hearts. There’s a reason for that. Jesus said it here in verse 13, “No one has greater love than this, to give one’s life for one’s friends.”
We have been revolving around this idea all along as we have talked about the greatest of the theological virtues, faith, hope and love. Paul said in I Corinthians 13 that “the greatest of these is love.” Now Jesus tells us what the greatest love is. It is love which gives up oneself, even to the point of death, for the sake of the one loved. That is how Jesus loved us. That is how God loves.
I talked earlier this year about how love is that which most characterizes the very nature of God’s own self as three persons in one God. Father, Son and Holy Spirit love each other. That loving relationship they share spills over into their, into God’s, relationship with us. That’s where our text begins in verse 9. Jesus tells us that “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.”
If you hear nothing else in this message and the others on love, hear what Jesus has to say about His love for us. He loves us like His heavenly Father loves Him. We are not gods, but Jesus loves us like we are. He loves us like we are divine children who deserve such love, even when we don’t. Jesus keeps on loving us like and even more than a mother keeps on loving a child who has gone wrong, who has hurt her, who has even rejected her love. Jesus came to offer to you and me the very same love which God the Father has for His Son. To accept that love from Jesus is to become yourself a child of God. I hope you will.
Then notice, though, as I’ve been saying right along for four weeks, the love of God, the love of Jesus for you and for me is not meant to stop there, stop in you, in me. When you connect your home to water or electricity, there’s a sense in which that is the end of the line. Electric power flows into your circuit breaker box and on to outlets in your home. Then you plug in an appliance or light or an electronic device and that’s where it stops. You don’t want that current flowing on out of your washing machine or lamp or television to go somewhere else. Likewise with your plumbing. The water stops at your tap and most of the time you have it turned off. But the love of God that Jesus brings us is meant to keep flowing, keep spreading on out through and beyond us. That’s what Jesus meant when He went on to say, “abide in my love.”
Then in verse 10 Jesus starts talking about “commandments,” about doing what He commanded. “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love.” To love, then, is to obey. That’s a little harder for us to grasp. On some levels we get it. One way children show love to parents is by obeying them. In our most frustrated moments we may say to someone, “If you really loved me, you would do what I ask.” But between human beings it is not always clear that obedience is love. That’s why Jesus has two answers to such worries.
The first answer is verse 11, “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.” It is true that “If you love me, you will do what I say” can be total manipulation, a way for a seducer or an abuser to take control and hurt someone. But if the aim is not control, but what is best for that other person, then it is something different. When doing what is said is for the person’s own benefit, for that person’s own joy, then it is not manipulation but real love, flowing both ways.
It’s like when a true friend tells me, “Read this book, I think you will really enjoy it.” If I care for and respect that person, I’ll at least try to read the book. If that suggestion, that “command,” was sincere, I may very well find some pleasure by doing what was asked. Saying, “If you love me, keep my commandments,” Jesus is saying, “Read my book, do what it says. You will really enjoy it.” And, unlike so many book recommendations and other human “commandments,” He is absolutely right.
The other answer to our worries about being manipulated into obedience is verse 12, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” Yes, it’s what in logic or argument one might call a bit “circular.” Jesus tells us that if we love Him we will do what He commands and what He command is that we love each other. But as we say in logic, the circularity is not “vicious.” It’s not a circle that goes nowhere or disproves its point. It’s not vicious, it’s gracious. It’s a circle that wants to draw us into its center, the center of love, where God is.
To draw us into the circle of divine love, then, Jesus here, not long before He did exactly what He was taking about, explained what the greatest love is. As I said at the beginning, it is love which gives up one’s own life for others. Once again, Jesus said in verse 13, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Some have imagined that there a conflict between this and what Jesus told us in the Sermon on the Mount, to love even our enemies. Is this greatest form of love to be limited to only those who are close to us, to our friends?
The thing is, that word translated “friends” is not the noun “friends,” but a form of one of the Greek verbs for love. Jesus is actually saying, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for those whom one loves.” The fact that He told us to love our enemies means that they are included in those to whom we are called to show the greatest love. And that’s exactly what Jesus did. Romans 5:8 says, “But God proves his love toward us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.” Further on, Paul says, “while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son.”
The greatest love knows no limit on what it is willing to give up, everything up to life itself, and it knows no limit on whom it includes, everyone down to our worst enemies. That’s what Jesus did and that is what He commands us to do. Earlier in John 13:34, He said, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”
In my blog this week I tried to explain how the greatest love, the love of Jesus which we are supposed to imitate, is different from some moral and ethical ideas which might be confused with it. I talked about Mr. Spock’s self-sacrifice in the Star Trek film, “The Wrath of Kahn.” Early on in that movie, Spock says to Admiral Kirk, ““Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”
Though it is not at all apparent that such an outlook is dictated by logic, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” is a pretty good summary of a moral system called utilitarianism. Utilitarianism imagines that one can “calculate” the moral worth of an action by how much it adds to or takes away from the sum total of happiness in the world. The happiness of many counts more than that of few or of one.
That utilitarian way of thinking about life has some attractions. Something like utilitarian calculation takes place when triage happens in an emergency room. If medical personnel and supplies are limited, to whom should care be given first in order to do the greatest amount of good for as many people as possible? If not everyone can be tested for COVID-19, then to whom do we allot those tests so the outcome helps as many people as we can?
So at the end of that Star Trek movie, when Spock gives up his own life to save the rest of the crew, he makes it seem as if he is only doing what is right by utilitarian logic. He puts his hand up to glass of the irradiated room where he is dying and there is this exchange:
Spock: “Don’t grieve, Admiral. It is logical. The needs of the many outweigh . . .”
Kirk: “The needs of the few.”
Spock: “Or the one.”
But, you know, it’s not really logical or necessarily even moral in all circumstances. Ursula LeGuin, no friend of Christianity, wrote a compelling tale in opposition to utilitarian calculus which weighs the needs of the few against the needs of the many, her famous short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” In that story a whole city, Omelas, lives in peace and prosperity because one child lives in darkness, misery and filth. The condition for everyone’s happiness and peace is the suffering of one poor single child. In the story, most of the citizens are willing to accept that price, but every now and then, she tells us, some leave the city and just walk away.
We may need to think like utilitarians sometimes in a hospital or in a natural disaster and do our best to do the greatest good for the greatest number. But LeGuin’s story shows us we can’t think that way all the time. We can’t simply accept that a certain percentage of people dying is the price to be paid for a restored economy, just like we couldn’t accept that the misery of Black slaves on the plantations was the price to be paid for prosperity in the South. The greatest love, the love of self-sacrifice, is ultimately quite different from merely letting the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
Spock gives us a clue to how the greatest love is different in the rest of what he said to Admiral Kirk as he was dying. He held up that Vulcan salute and said, “You have been and always will be my friend.” Yes, you could see his death as simply balancing many lives against one life. But as Spock looked at Kirk, he expressed something deeper: the love of friendship, the love of Damon for Pythias, the love of Jesus for His disciples, and for us.
The greatest love can’t be just a calculation that losing one life is better than losing many. That’s what John says the high priest thought back in chapter 11 verse 50.
Caiaphas the priest argued, “It is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.” It was those who crucified Him who were doing the calculating, not Jesus.
So think about this. Think about Damon and Pythias. Think about Spock and Kirk. Think about a mother who gives her life for her child, or a husband for a wife, or any friend for a friend. Think about Jesus’ story of the shepherd who leaves the 99 and goes to find just one lost sheep. The greatest love will give one’s life even just for one other life. There doesn’t have to be many lives to outweigh the few. The greatest love gives itself up even for just a few, even for one. It’s not about balancing some moral scale.
Having and acting on the greatest love means displaying the sort of self-giving love which the three persons of God constantly offer to each other. They don’t weigh out or vote on what they do, the needs of two against the needs of one. They simply, constantly, unselfishly give, without any thought for cost. I am absolutely convinced that Jesus, acting on that kind of divine love, would have been willing to die on the Cross even if there had been just one other human being to save. That is the greatest love.
I talked two weeks ago about how self-love can lead us to true love for others when the happiness and welfare of others is an expansion of our own happiness and welfare. As I said, Aristotle talked about a friend as “another self.” So when we love a friend, we are in fact loving our own selves and obeying Jesus command to love our neighbor as ourselves. That is why Jesus goes on in today’s passage to use the actual word for “friends.”
Jesus first uses the idea of friendship to repeat His statement that to love Him is to do what He commands. Verse 14 says, “You are my friends if you do what I command you,” and of course again, that command is to love one another as He loved us. But Jesus is not saying that we somehow earn His friendship by loving each other. He is saying that He is already our friend and that love for each other is how we show Jesus is our friend.
So in verse 15 Jesus goes on to one of the sweetest of His sayings, one of gentlest and kindest of His expressions of love for us. “I do not call you slaves any longer, because the slave does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I heard from my Father.” I’ve translated that word more literally to be the harsh word “slave” instead of “servant” like most modern translations, because I think it is a word we need to hear and be a little shocked by right now. Jesus came to undo and transform the whole business of “masters” and “slaves.”
In his book Dominion, Tom Holland begins by noting that crucifixion was the tool the Roman empire used to keep slaves from revolt. Any protest, any act of rebellion, was swiftly met with overwhelming force. Instigators were arrested and hung up on crosses to die a slow, agonizing death in public view over several days. The cross was a deterrent that kept the masses of slaves in line and allowed the ruling class to live in peace.
Jesus was telling His followers that instead of identifying with the ruling class, with the masters of the world, He would identify with the slaves. He would, in fact, die like slaves and protestors died, hanging on a cross. He would not call anyone His slave but instead call them His friends. Like true friends do for each other, He would give His life for them.
So Holland explains that Christianity, the death of Jesus upon the Cross, is in fact the root of all protest against slavery and inequality. He argues that “Humanism derives ultimately from claims made in the Bible: that humans are made in God’s image; that his Son died equally for everyone; that there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female.”[1] I don’t think Holland quite sees it yet, but what he appreciates is the love of Jesus, the greatest love which gives one’s life for another, which has fostered all our modern ideas of equality and human rights and concern for those who are oppressed. It all grows out of our faith in a God willing to die on a cross.
Which all means that political concerns about equal access to housing or to voting or to medical care, or protests which are outraged at injustice toward Blacks or at the appropriation of native lands, all are rooted in Christian faith. It is because Jesus called you and me, and anyone else who follows Him, “friends,” that we cannot simply turn away from others and let them suffer or die, or even just live in misery, as if they were not our own friends.
In verse 16, Jesus continues, “You did not choose me but I chose you.” Our faith does not begin when we choose to be friends with Jesus. It starts in the fact that He befriended us and demonstrated the depth of that friendship on the Cross. But as I keep saying, it does not stop there. The friendship of Jesus is meant to pass through us and outward in the form of friendship with others. He went on, “And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last…” Jesus connected the greatest love of self-sacrifice back to the picture at the beginning of the chapter. He is the grape vine and we are branches. Branches bear fruit. Jesus has now explained that that fruit is love, the greatest love in the world.
Our role then is to keep discovering how to grow that greatest love in our lives and in the world around us. Some Christians literally do what Jesus did, and give their lives for others. I’m sure there are doctors and nurses who did and right now are doing that all over the world as they risk themselves to care for coronavirus patients. More often, though, we imitate and grow the love and friendship of Christ in smaller ways, dying smaller deaths.
I suggested in a letter to you all Friday that one way Christians in our community might “die” a little is to let go of a particular piece of concrete in the shape of a cross in order to befriend and show love to those who have suffered racism. But, honestly, the love, the friendship of Jesus is not usually displayed in big public gestures. It shows up more in things like giving up a comfortable income cushion to sponsor a child in Congo, or by giving up some pride to admit I was wrong in an argument, or through giving up your time to listen to the struggles of someone you don’t yet know very well.
Please fill in your own ways you might do what Jesus did and “lay down your life,” at least in part. Make a friend out of someone who is not yet a friend. As we remember now at His Table, our Lord did and is always doing that for you and me. He commanded us to eat this bread and drink this cup in order to remember Him and His friendship. But the last verse just says it once more, “I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.” That’s the point of it all, of everything that Jesus told us to do. That’s the greatest love.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2020 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (New York: Basic Books, 2019), p. 539f.