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Today’s comic is about a silly argument between brothers, but John’s despair echoes how many of us feel at the state of society lately. I preached a sermon this past week on John 15, what it means to love others the way Christ loved us. Moments after washing his disciples’ feet, and moments before his betrayal, Jesus said these words:
My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command. 15 I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. 16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. 17 This is my command: Love each other.
I long to see that love in the world. I hold fiercely to this hope that loving Jesus might actually bear the fruit of that kind of selfless love in the world. But I despair when instead I see Christians claim to “love” but it’s more on their own terms, more to control and assimilate others, than anything that looks even a little bit like Jesus.
I told my congregation this:
As I see Christians celebrate discrimination against minorities, I see nothing of the love of Christ. I don’t want to show the love of Christ to the people who revel in injustice. I would much rather say, “Well if those Christians over there don’t love the way I think they should, then they must not be real Christians.” I want to write them off the way they have written me off when they say there is no such thing as a gay Christian.I want nothing to do with the Christians who “are not racist” but constantly silence black voices.Loving your enemy is so much harder when that enemy is supposed to be your sibling in Christ.
But we are witnesses of the love of Christ. The foot washing, in-the-flesh, death and resurrection love of Christ. There will always be reasons to be angry, frustrated, and hurt. So let us cling quite fiercely to this little passage in the book of John, like a life raft in a sea of troubles. Christ HAS called you friends. You are the people God loves.So love yourself the way God loves you. And if you’re going to try to love others the way God loves them, you’re going to want to abide in God’s love.
Rest in this love. Recover in this love. Renew in this love.
As Jesus fills your own cup, let the overflow spill out into the way you love others.
Not to control them. Not to make them just like you. But because God saw them as someone worth living for.
God saw them as someone worth dying for.