“As I Have Loved You” May 9, 2004
Acts 11: 1-18, Rev. 21: 1-5, John 13: 31-35 Rev. James W. Moore
According
to the Guinness Book of World Records, the shortest sermon ever preached
was given by a certain Mr. Roberts in
You might ask what’s so new about love. Hasn’t it been around forever? And why a commandment? Why would it be necessary to command something that we all need and want?
According
to Nicky Gumbel, presenter in the Alpha program, there was a certain married
couple who were exceptionally argumentative.
The man was always caustic and mean-spirited, the woman typically responded
in kind while adding her own variations of unpleasantness, and from the early
days of their marriage they were always battling. Somehow, though, they stayed married year
after year, battling all the way, until they at last arrived at their 50th
wedding anniversary. Their children
wanted to give them some present that was appropriate for the occasion, and
after much thought they decided that the best present would be a gift
certificate for some sessions with the finest marriage counselor in
After considerable argument about whether to accept this gift, and whether to go to a counseling session, the couple did do so - arguing all the way to the session, in the waiting room, and throughout the time they spent with the counselor. At last the counselor stood up, saying, “I have never seen a marriage so devoid of love,” and as he walked over toward the woman he said “I’m going to do something very unprofessional, something I’ve never done in all my years of practice.” He took the woman in his arms, and then he kissed her, on the lips, for a long time. Turning to the man he said “There, that’s what this woman needs, at least three times a week.”
“Well, Doctor,” the husband replied, “If that’s what you think best..... I’ll bring her in on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.”
Somehow I don’t think that was what the counselor had in mind, nor is it anything close to what Jesus was commanding as said the words “A new commandment I give you that you love one another,” and then added one more important phrase: “As I have loved you.......” “As I have loved you, so you should love one another. By this will all know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
“As I have loved you.........” Everybody loves – but what would it mean to love as Jesus loved?
As some of you may
know, the New Testament was written in the Greek language, and there are
several Greek words which are all translated into English as “love.” What’s interesting and helpful is that the
Greek words make it clear, as our single English word can not, that there are
many different kinds of love. One of
those Greek words is eros, which refers to romantic love or erotic
love. Eros is an important
reality in life, and it is a wonderful component of many relationships, but
that’s not what Jesus was talking about when he commanded disciples to love each
other........ A second Greek word, storge, refers to familial love and
affection – also important, but not the kind of love Jesus was
commanding...... Then there’s a
third Greek word for love: philia –
referring to the mutual respect and care that can develop between friends, “brotherly
love,” as it is sometimes called. William Penn named his new settlement “
CS Lewis, in a book entitled Four Loves, boiled all of this down to a basic distinction – a dsitinction between what he called “need love” and “gift love.”
Need love, Lewis says,
is always born of emptiness. It is basically acquisitive to the core, seeing in
every beloved object or person a value that he or she covets to possess. Need
love moves out greedily to grasp and to appropriate for itself – sucking the essence
out of another and into itself. It does not take exceptional imagination, Lewis
contends, to acknowledge that many times when we humans say to another, "I
love you," what we are really meaning is, "I need you, I want you.
You have a value that I very much desire to make my own, no matter what the
consequence may be to you." Eros,
storge, and even philia – romantic love, family affection and love
between friends – can easily become nothing more that “need love” – this
selfish acquisitive attitude. If our
lives are fueled by nothing more than competing desires to use one another,
what kind of existence can this be? What
will a family be like, or a church, or a community, if the only force at work
is the desire to fill our needs?
Jesus didn’t command “need love.” He didn’t have to, since it comes so
naturally to us. He didn’t forbid it
either, but what he commanded was something that prevents our neediness from
sliding into a tragic and hurtful chaos.
He commanded agapé, what Lewis calls “gift love.”
Instead of being born of emptiness or lack, this form of
loving is born of fullness. The goal of gift love is to enrich and enhance the
beloved rather than to extract value. Gift love moves out to bless and to
increase rather to acquire or to diminish. Gift love is like a bountiful,
artesian well that continues to overflow, not a vacuum or a black hole. Lewis
reminds his readers that the biblical vision of reality is that God's love is
gift love, not need love. And then he says, "We humans are made in the
image of such everlasting and unconditional love." In other words, it is within our capacity to
love as God loves. Jesus was not
commanding the impossible when he said “Love one another as I have loved you.”
(The above references to Lewis are adapted from
a sermon by John Claypool, cited in The Text This Week.)
As I’ve
been mulling all week about this commandment to love I’ve had two competing
thoughts swirling around in my brain – sort of a “good news – bad news” pair of
ideas. The first is that “gift love” is
sometimes very difficult – requiring commitment and sacrifice, sometimes at a
very costly level. Certainly anybody who
has been a mother, or been blessed to have had a good mother, will know
this. The fluffy, greeting card versions
of motherhood may not acknowledge this, but good mothers (and fathers too, for
that matter) are signed on for a long period of servitude. Anyone who was ever so naïve as to say “I
want to have children so there will be somebody to love me,” would realize
pretty quickly what a fruitless idea that is.
Mothering is often a matter of sacrificing – time, sleep, money,
personal goals, convenience, freedom, to name just a few of the qualities of
life that are often compromised. A good
mother has to make peace with the idea that she will be giving, giving for a
long time, and giving in ways that she probably couldn’t have imagined before
this chapter commenced.
Jesus must
have known that this kind of loving isn’t easy.
If it were the sort of thing that just happens automatically he wouldn’t
have had to command it. No, somewhere
along the line the capacity to love as Jesus loved requires of us a commitment,
a readiness to sacrifice, a selflessness that doesn’t happen effortlessly.
So that’s
one thought, and I know it doesn’t make the Christian life sound very
attractive. But here’s the other almost
contradictory idea that goes with it, and it’s one that has been confirmed in
my experience. When people make the
decision to practice “gift love,” to do agapé loving, or to try to follow Jesus’
commandment, something wonderful often happens.
Their life is not all one-sided and grim; it’s not an endless drudgery
of servitude and suffering on behalf of others.
People who freely decide to practice agapé love find that they also
receive it. They generate a cycle in
which giving and receiving seem to be in constant flux. The gift they give to others sometimes draws
forth a similar attitude – so that the giving and the loving are mutual, not
one-sided. They enter into God’s realm,
in which the effort to give often engenders a blessing from God – not of the
sort that you can scheme to receive, but of the sort that comes as a surprise
and a wonder.
That
seems to have been the case in the earthly Jesus’ life. He came to give, to serve, to offer selfless
love – but he attracted to himself many people, both men and women, who loved
him deeply. Jesus was surrounded by
people who loved him. That wasn’t his
mission, to collect people who loved him – but it was the natural result of his
selfless love. I think something like
that happens in parental love too.
Mothers (and fathers) who make the commitment to this gift love way of
living find that they also receive. The
love they sacrificially offer is not wasted, and in some way in comes back to
them – not necessarily right away, not in a way that can be measured and
quantified, but in ways that are unique to every situation. In some way they are blessed to live in an
environment of love.
Jesus
wouldn’t have commanded us to love if everyone did it automatically. But I also think it’s right to say that he
wouldn’t have commanded us to love if it were not ultimately a blessed way of
life, with gifts and joys imbedded in the labor and sacrifices.
So on this
Mothers’ Day we’ll have a lot of talk about love. Nobody has ever had a perfect mother, but if
you have received love, “gift love”, God’s kind of love, from your mother, I
hope you’ll acknowledge it – whether your mother is here to receive your
thanks, or with God in the life to come.
But all of us – whatever our roles in life – have the opportunity to be
bearers of love, agapé love, gift love.
Let this day be a decision day, a day of commitment, a day for hearing
and heeding the commandment of Christ, the one who taught and demonstrated,
saying “Love one another, as I have loved you.”