Sermon by Rev Sydney Maitland for Sunday 5 May 2024.
• First Reading: Acts 10: 44-48 (Peter’s address to Cornelius – the coming of the Holy Spirit)
• Epistle: 1 John 5: 1-6 (Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ of God is born of God. Everyone born of God overcomes the world. Our faith is the victory over the world)
• Gospel: John 15: 9-17 (Love each other as I have loved you)
One of the intriguing aspects of life is how much we rely on signs and images. A product or an idea are represented by an image – a picture, with a slogan and perhaps a tune of sorts.
Get that package of impressions right and then you can project it into every home in the land. It applies to commercial products, political ideas, not to mention our ideas of right and wrong.
And the successful marketer can project a whole package of ideas and values, of things to be bought and thought and valued, without too much attention going into what is really being presented to us and at what cost.
Even in the area of religion, if we take a slogan or the image of a building and we can convey a full set of beliefs. The picture of St Peter’s in Rome says one thing, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the Western Wall say something quite different.
Politically, a picture of the Elizabeth tower says one thing, and that of Red Square in Moscow something quite different.
And so Jesus presents His disciples with some new and radical commands. Love one another – as I have loved you. In fact He goes much further: As the Father has loved Me, I have loved you. Remain in this love – remain in this kind and quality of love, and do not be satisfied with anything less.
It is a love that goes beyond liking or tolerating one another. It goes beyond offering one another the occasional service even if it is inconvenient. It is more than the social conventions required to ensure that we get along without allowing disagreement or misunderstandings to erupt into violence, of the kind that develop into generational blood feuds.
Rather this is the love that stands in the line of that Greatest Commandment: love God with all your heart and soul, and mind and strength. Start with God and allow this love to define your other loves.
Love your neighbour as you love yourself. Just do not get too close to the methods and loyalties of the world, with all their deceptions and forms of self-love and self-obsession.
Now love was developing a form and a content. In going to the cross, Jesus was going to give it an eternal, visual form and dimension. It would be utterly self-giving, holding nothing back. There would be no room for reservations and it would indeed go for broke.
Jesus would commit Himself into His Father’s hands at the end of it all, having stripped Himself of all that He had and leaving nothing behind but love.
And the power of that love and that forgiveness would be with Him until He drew His final breath, and His heart beat a final time.
For some this is too extreme. It goes too far, and it is unreasonable. It is one thing to take your place in the queue and to wait for your turn. To be polite and well-mannered, and to go along in order to get along.
But this kind of love and this kind of loyalty smack of extremism. Fundamentalism. There is something uncompromising about it and it shows others up. It shines a light into peoples’ lives and shows up corners that we would prefer to keep hidden and in shadow.
But then Jesus’ vision does not end with a short journey, lying down in the back of a black limousine, already senseless and stripped of all knowledge or self-awareness.
Jesus is thinking about is forever, what endures beyond the limits of space and time, and what abides in the eternal presence of God.
He is looking at a realm that always lived and thrived, before and beyond even the Garden of Eden. It is more about that New Jerusalem, where His Father is the gardener.
And so He is looking beyond those petty distractions of fashion and convenience and into a realm that is utterly real, more real than even this one, where He knows even as He is known, where there are no shadows and only realms that have yet to be revealed to minds and hearts not yet ready to receive them.
And how can any survive in this place when distracted by petty resentments and jealousies? How can love thrive when cluttered up by memories that should have been laid to rest decades ago?
How can an ear rejoice in new harmonies when still deafened by old discords, or an eye see colours when still having to look through a darkened lens, bespattered by mud?
And so the love that is godly and is of God is the only kind that can prepare to receive and rejoice in what is yet to come.
Love one another as I have loved you is not a vain platitude for the inadequate and the losers of life. It is certainly not ‘Pie int the sky when you die.’
Far more, it is about preparing to receive what is ahead of us, and doing so in a way that blesses those around us who are still perplexed, confused and groping their way into the truths that are still waiting for them.
Jesus was never calling us to package up a sales pitch of our own design. It was always so that His joy may be in us and so that our joy may be complete – infectious, compelling, and overflowing to all who can perceive it.