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March 25, 2007
How Can You and I Love Jesus?
Exodus 19: 1-9/John 14: 12-24
March 25, 2007
Next Sunday is Palm Sunday, which means that the cycle of the year has come full circle. The cycle began only four months ago, with Advent. We go from Jesus’ birth to His death in just four months. After Easter comes what’s called Ordinary Time. Ordinary Time starts with Trinity Sunday, the first Sunday after Pentecost (May 27th) and goes until the first Sunday of Advent, November 25th. How interesting but irrelevant you say.
Jesus never proposed that we celebrate either Easter or Christmas—two very important days to us. What He did propose was that we love each other day in and day out, throughout the year and throughout the years. And towards the end of His ministry Jesus even talked a little about our loving Him. Only in John’s Gospel, towards the end does he introduce the idea that we might love Jesus.
I wonder why, when the Great Commandment says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength,” Jesus did not start early to tell His disciples, “Love me with all you’ve got!” because I’m the One with the Father. Instead of this, Jesus taught more on the second commandment that was like the first, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Look in a concordance under the word “love” in the Gospels. You’ll find that nearly every time Jesus talked about love it had to do with loving God or loving other people. More specifically Jesus said to His disciples that the clue that they were His disciples would be their love for one another. Crazy idealism!
Why did Jesus not emphasize the importance of loving Him? What kind of modesty was this in the Son of God? I remember Paul tells us, “He emptied Himself.” This one who died out of love for the world emptied Himself. Maybe this is why so little is written about loving Jesus in the New Testament. Jesus wasn’t out there looking to see if anyone loved Him. He wanted them to love God and to love one another. He transparently showed them God but they couldn’t see through Him. We’re not talking about the theology of the Trinity here, that Jesus was the Second Person of the Trinity. We’re talking about what the Man Jesus showed as He mingled with people.
I scrolled back through the hymns I remember to see which ones had to do with loving Jesus. I didn’t come up with too many. Indeed, there are not very many. I thought I remembered one line. In the hymn, “O Love that Will Not Let me Go,” written by George Matheson, the blind pastor of the 19th century Scottish Free Church ” there is the line, “I give thee back the life I owe that from its ocean depths may flow life that will endless be.” I thought I remembered that Matheson wrote of love he owed, but I was wrong. It was life, not love he dashed off in that quickly written masterpiece of hymnody. It took him five minutes he said to write this hymn—on June 6, 1882. But it was LIFE not LOVE he felt we owe back to the Love that will not let us go.
We sing here sometimes a round of love to the Holy Trinity:
”Father . . . Jesus . . . Spirit I adore, you lay my life before you, how I love you.”
Then there is the Gospel song we sang this morning, “O how I love Jesus.” Why? Because He first loved me.” Maybe it’s usually that way. We love those who love us, and then when we think to when we first began to love someone, maybe it was a reaction to their first loving us.
I remember a romantic sounding ditty from my high school youth group years, “More time alone with Thee, Lord Jesus.” I don’t know that any of us had developed a devotional life, but it was something we talked about. I thought sometimes that it was a trifle hypocritical to sing, “More time alone with Thee, Lord Jesus,” as though we were love-struck teenagers, when we really spent very little time alone with Him.
Various of the saints of the Church were known for their love for Jesus. To mind comes St. Catherine of Sienna, the 14th century Dominican nun who had visions of being engaged to Jesus. She said Jesus called her, “my wife,” and would show the engagement ring the Lord gave to her—a ring only she could see.
But we don’t get much benefit from knowing the ecstatic visions of unusual Christians. What is appropriate in our feelings toward Jesus—because feelings plays a part in love. Why is love for Jesus, the Man of Galilee who lived His short life on Planet Earth so small a part of our thinking? Maybe because the historical figure, Jesus, lived so long ago that we actually know of Him distantly. But we speak of a “personal relationship with Christ.” What part does or ought love for Him play in this personal relationship?
What did Jesus say about loving Him? Listen to what Jesus said as recorded in John 14. Six times John mentions something Jesus said about loving Him: “If you love me you will keep my commandments (15),” and then, “He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who love me (21),” followed by, “The one who loves me will be loved by my father, and I will love Him and manifest myself to him (21b) “ and “If someone loves me he will keep my word (23) “ and “He who does not love me does not keep my words (24)”. Finally, Jesus said what must have sounded contradictory to His disciples, “If you loved me you would have rejoiced because I go to the Father (28).” That’s it. That’s the extent of His teaching about loving Him. Six brief remarks in one teaching in one of the Gospels—with no elaboration about what love means.
Luke tells us that the woman who anointed Jesus feet loved Him much because she recognized how much she had been forgiven. But this is a report of someone who loved Him, not a teaching that she ought to love Him. Perhaps if we realized the extent of our forgiveness we would love Him—Luke is instructing us when he reports this story.
We don’t hear Jesus say anything more about loving Him until after the resurrection, again from the Gospel of John. Jesus asked Peter three times, “Peter, do you love me more than these?—referring to the rest of the disciples. And then, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” And finally, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?”
The Greek word for love in the first two of these questions is the agape-word—that we think of as the self-giving love, God’s kind of love--without condition. Peter answered, “Yes.” To both questions. Clearly he was becoming nervous at this line of questioning because his self-giving love ran short a few days before. People who read this think that Jesus asked Peter this three times because Peter had denied Him three times on the night of Jesus’ trial. Perhaps.
The third time Jesus asked Peter if he loved Him He used another word for love, the verb form of the word meaning friend--phileo. “Peter, are you my friend?” Why this different word for love the third time? Maybe it’s because Jesus had spoken to them about being His friends—if you do what I command you. Maybe when Peter heard Jesus use the “friend” word for love the third time he understood that what the Lord looked for was true friendship, the kind that prompts consistent obedience. Loving Jesus with the self-giving kind of love can show itself in a flurry of martyrdom, or in passionate defense when needed. But being Jesus’ friend requires continuity. It’s easier to die for someone than to live in true friendship. How many friendships weather the tests of time? Jesus wanted from Peter a love that would stand the test of time—friendship.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and most of John tell us repeatedly to love God and our neighbor. John emphasizes that we should love each other as Jesus loved us, a new kind of love that makes us willing to lay down our lives for each other. But Jesus spoke sparingly about loving Him.
Isn’t it odd that Jesus did not say, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples because you love me.” They’ll we know we are His disciples if we love one another. Jesus wasn’t teaching theology here; He was teaching something personal and experiential. Friendship with Jesus demands continuity with each other and not spasms of display during the rush of a challenge.
John, the disciple closest to Jesus personally remembered how the Lord stressed loving one another most. John reminded his fellow Christians, “The one who says he is in the light and hates his brother is in the darkness still.” Being “in the light” meant being a follower of Jesus, the Light of the world. And then more forcefully John wrote, “If any one says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar. For the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.”
It is really sad to see Christians who care an awful lot about God and the Truth, but they don’t seem to love other Christians very much.
In this last part of John’s first letter he writes of loving God rather than loving Jesus. But the two loves are alike if not the same for those of us who have not seen either Jesus or the One to whom Jesus prayed.
I need to become very personal with you in conclusion. Something I hope may linger in all our thoughts as participants in this community of people drawn to Faith Church for various reasons, but principally because we have trusted in Jesus: You and I show our friendship with Jesus by our friendship with one another. I urge you not only to be often in this place, and that you be here at that first moment on the Lord’s Day when I invite you to greet one another—, which theologically speaking is like saying hello to Jesus, but that you find a place in this fellowship where it is evident you are a friend.
Jesus taught us that if we walk in the light we have fellowship with one another. There are so many things that inhibit this fellowship. We lead busy lives so that there is not the time it seems, to give to friendship here. I’m reminded of what I heard on WBAA recently of someone who said to a great violinist after a concert, “I wanted to be a good violinist but I didn’t have the time.” Maybe we say, “I’d like to be a friend to others here, but I haven’t the time.”
How often have friendships here been broken by disappointment or resentment or other feelings that could not be healed by self-scrutiny and forgiveness. It’s easier to pull away than to restore a friendship by forgiveness. There are, after all, many other churches available where one can begin afresh with no one I know well enough to be irritated with him--yet.
I hear the echo of Jesus’ words down through the corridors of time, ““If you love me you will keep my commandments (15),” and then, “He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who love me (21),” “He who does not love me does not keep my words (24)”. And finally, “If we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another—and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.”
Let us love God with heart, soul, strength, and mind. Let us love our neighbor as ourselves. Let us love Jesus, that is, let us keep His words—being doers of the word and not hearers only—like people who build their houses on a rock and when the rain comes tumbling down the house does not go flat.
Let us pray: O Lord, we are not in doubt what You have taught us. Grant to us the courage to keep your words. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at March 25, 2007 11:00 AM