John 13:31-35, from the Fifth Sunday after Easter
Whoever sold lace doilies in West Virginia during the ’70s must have made a fortune off of my grandmother.
She had them seemingly everywhere in her house, on night stands, side tables, head boards and dresser tops – even under the pots that held her many house plants, although those tended to be the older, rattier ones. Their tiny, crocheted loops fascinated me as a kid, both because of their intricacy and because of their pointlessness. Why spend so much time making a circle out of knotted thread when a circle of ordinary cloth would have served the same function?
Jesus’ words in the Gospel of John tend to remind me of those doilies. He seems to talk in ways far more lacy than they need to be, or even should be. The first two verses of this week’s Lectionary offer a case in point. “Now the Son of Man is glorified, and God is glorified in him. If God is glorified in him, God will glorify the Son in himself, and will glorify him at once.”
See what I mean? The passage seems to be shooting for a record number of interlocking glorifications. And I seriously doubt Jesus actually spoke this way. Look at the books of Daniel and Ezra if you want to see how Aramaic, Jesus’ likeliest tongue, translates into English. Developed on the fly as a language to let people from different Middle Eastern cultures trade with one another, Aramaic is not a language designed for verbal doilymaking.
So it’s perhaps easy to overlook, or dismiss as just more fancy knotwork, what comes out of the mouth of John’s Jesus in verses 34 and 35: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
That’s three – count ‘em, three – “love one anothers” in as many sentences. But is it just more John-style loopity loopity loop? I don’t think so. Because if you zoom out a bit, you see that Jesus said this, or at least a version of this, knowing full well how unlovely the people around him were about to become. Judas was already on his way to sell Jesus out for 30 pieces of silver. In the very next passage, Jesus predicts Peter will deny him three times before daybreak. Jesus knew, in fact, that every one of the disciples would “fall away” (Mark 14:27), and that many of the same people who had just cheered him as he rode into Jerusalem would jeer him as he died on a cross.
But he loved them, all of them, in spite of their unloveliness, and he reminded us – no, commanded us – in his last hours to love one another in the same way.
We’re not talking about easy love, here. We’re talking about love you’ve got to work at, tough love, brave love, love you’ve got to give knowing you’ll get nothing out of it, knowing that giving it might cost you everything you have. As Prof. Karoline Lewis writes in her reflection on this passage:
“The ‘love commandment’ is said in the midst of betrayal and denial, in the midst of departure and desperation, in the midst of fear and unease. And so, this is the nature of Christian love. It is a love aware of consequences. It is a love aware of challenges. But most of all, it is a love that loves anyway. A love that knows what it is getting itself into, and yet loves abundantly.
“Otherwise, our love merely skims the surface of Gospel love, of God’s love. It will be satisfied with the love of the world, a love that demands and decrees, a love that stipulates and insists on certain standards, a love that has convinced itself of a self-maintaining love, a self-preserving love, a self-love. A love unwilling to take risks. A scared love. A safe love.”
Jesus has called us to love one another, and to do it the way he has loved us. Here in 2019, five Sundays after Easter, awash in headlines about how unlovely the world can be, wounded, perhaps, by the failures and betrayals of those around us, perhaps even of those closest to us, we face difficult questions. Can we love like that? How? And if we can, will we?
