Abide in my love (John 15)

“As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Abide in my love.” From the Gospel according to John, chapter 15, verse 9.
     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
     Today’s Gospel is all about Love. Love. We all have some idea what the word means. Most of us at one time or another have felt love for another, or have felt the love of another for us. We all recognize when love is present, and when it is absent. The yearning for love pervades a lot of popular entertainment, songs, movies, television, stories, and so on. I went to my Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary and found some definitions: strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties; attraction based on desire; affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests; warm attachment, enthusiasm, or devotion; unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another; the (fatherly) concern of God for humanity. These definitions are not all of the ones listed in Webster’s, but they are a good sample, and include the range of possibilities.
      When we Christians think of love, at least publicly, and in church, we probably think of the Webster’s explicitly religious definition: the concern of God for humanity. This is a nice, safe, general, nonspecific, easy-to-say kind of definition. The “concern of God for humanity” can be extended to the “life, work, and teachings of Jesus.” And there it can end, without being spelled out in any more detail than that.
     But today’s Gospel begins to spell it out. And it points in the direction of details, if I can use that word, which take love into an area of specifics, requirements, possibilities, which encompass all of life, and beyond.
     In verse 10, the Gospel says, “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love.” We all know what our Lord’s commandments are: feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit (and care for) the sick and the prisoner and the orphan and the widow, love our neighbors as ourselves. To do these things willingly is to “abide in love.” They are not dependent necessarily on feeling a particular kind of affection or desire, which our dictionary definitions suggest, although there can be special feelings involved.
     Jesus compares our keeping his commandments, to his keeping his Father’s commandments. There is a parallel, and a direct connection, between our work in the world, and God’s work in Jesus. In the Our Father we pray, “your will be done, on earth as in heaven.” It is not too much to say, that our work in the world, our following the commandments of Jesus, IS God’s work. We are Christ’s body in the world, and we are, in a sense, bringing heaven to earth, and bringing earth to heaven, when we perform the straightforward, easy-to-understand actions which our Lord requires of us. Just as God becomes incarnate in Jesus, so Jesus’s work becomes incarnate, as it were, in the world, through our work, through our love for him.
      “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.” This verse, verse 11 of today’s Gospel, is a strong indicator of something special which our Lord is pointing out to us. The important word is joy. JOY. Up to now, it has perhaps seemed that the love of Jesus is a dry performance of simple duties, without any emotion being attached to them. And there is a certain wisdom in being free from emotion, so that we don’t imagine that we have to feel a certain way when we are doing what Jesus requires us to do. There is nothing worse than pretending to a happiness which we do not feel, when acting in the name of our Lord. That pretense is nothing more than hypocrisy, and it is easy to recognize. Our Lord is not telling us to pretend to be joyful, or, by implication, telling us that we are missing something if we are not feeling joyful. No, he is telling us something else entirely
     Jesus is talking about his joy in us. Generally, it should be enough for us that Jesus is pleased with what we are doing in his name. “I have said these things to you…that your joy may be complete,” is a promise, not necessarily that we will feel “complete” all the time, but that we are on the way to our completion, the fulfillment of our lives in him, in this world and the next. It is an anticipation of our future, resurrected state, of which we have a taste in this life. Earthly joys are types, models, anticipations of the joys of heaven.
     There were, and are, many Christian mystics who speak of their experience of the presence of God in terms like this. We must keep this in mind, when we hear Jesus talking about ‘joy’ and ‘love.’ These are powerful, archetypal words, which draw on the fullness of human experience. They are not merely casual, offhand chatter, a convenient way of talking about shallow feelings.
     And what does this lead to? In verse 11, today’s Gospel says, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Of course we think of the literal meaning of this text, that Jesus will die for his friends. But the text reminds us of the self-forgetfulness of love, the devotion of love, which confers the ultimate freedom, that of giving up life, a narrow, self-centered, ego-based life, for a life of union with another, a life in true community, in union with the ultimate other, which is God.
     For, in the end, that is what this is about, life in God. The Christian understanding of God as Trinity, is a way of saying that God has an inner life, in which He invites us to share, and that sharing is love. We become participants in his life, by love, by the love which he extends to us in Jesus, and in which he includes us. This is what Jesus is getting at, when he says, “I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.” The love extends from the Father to Jesus to us, in the Spirit, and back again. This double movement, this eternal dance, is the love in which we are called to participate, and to which the deepest human feelings and desires direct us. This is our Christian vocation, this is the purpose of our Christian lives.
     “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Abide in my love.”
     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.