A commandment to love
Commentary
Object:
“Love one another” sounds so simple, but can be so hard. Without a constant connection with God, we find our faith degenerating into a system of rules. This Mother’s Day we are invited into deep reflection on the interplay of love and rules, on loving through the worst that can happen, and on how we keep the love of God alive and vital in our lives and world.
Acts 10:44-48
Today’s short passage picks up where the Easter Sunday reading left off, with Peter’s speech to Cornelius’ household in Caesarea. While we hear Peter’s speech (Acts 10:34-43) every Easter Sunday, nowhere in the Revised Common Lectionary do we encounter the remarkable story of Peter and Cornelius told in Acts 10:1-33. It is worth telling this story, for its own amazing narrative of complementary visions in separate cities bringing the right people together at just the right moment, and for the profound importance this story had in the expansion of the early church. With a bit of planning, youth or adults could act out this story, which lends itself readily to a visual portrayal with its multiple characters, clear dialogue, and movements from one household to another. Acts 11:1-18 is read on Easter 5 of Cycle C in the Revised Common Lectionary, but it is also worth mentioning today how Peter’s experience challenged and then transformed the vision of the Jerusalem church. In today’s reading, we hear a second Pentecost story that encompassed not simply faithful Jews from all nations, as in the first day of Pentecost (Acts 2:5-11), but Gentiles, the non-Jewish believers. As the apostles praised God after hearing Peter’s story, “Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life” (Acts 11:23).
1 John 5:1-6
Who was Jesus, really? The Jewish Messiah, the Son of God? A mere mortal? An apparition? Somehow the Christian community to whom the author of 1 John was writing had become divided over this question. Two thousand-plus years into Christianity, we may forget or never realize how urgent this question was for the early church. While debates over Jesus’ true nature continue to this day, we know the answers the church has come to over the ages. I remember my amazement when I first learned of riots in the streets of Alexandria in the midst of the Arian controversy in the early 300s CE. Many people had many ideas about who exactly Jesus was and was not, and it took the church several centuries, and the interest of an emperor (Constantine), to come to a definitive statement at the Council of Nicaea.
Centuries before Nicaea, the community for whom this letter was written faced its own conflicts over who Jesus was. Some involved in the dispute had left the community, and those who remained struggled in the aftermath of the conflict; some may have been led to doubt their faith in Jesus, even as they remained within the fold. The exact nature of the dispute remains obscure, but from statements within the letter it seems to have had to do with the veracity of claims that Jesus was the fully human son of God who died and rose from the dead. Perhaps detractors had claimed Jesus was not fully human or had not really died on the cross.
The writer of this letter is clearly in the Johannine tradition, echoing the phrases and theology of the Gospel of John, including our reading today. “They will know we are Christians by our love” rings in the background of both Johannine readings today. Both lessons emphasize following God’s commandments, but the commandments to follow are simple: to love God and to love one another. The vast code of Jewish law no longer seems of interest. A new commandment has been given: Love.
John 15:9-17
Recall the context of these words of Jesus. He is sitting with his disciples after washing their feet at the Last Supper. Judas has already left the table. Soon they will all go out to the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus is about to be separated from his disciples forever in his physical, human form. With all that is to come ? betrayal, denial, judgement, death, it would be easy for his followers to turn on one another, point fingers, abandon this now lost and leaderless group of disciples. What is about to come is amazingly hard, shocking, and tragic. To prepare them, and as he says his farewells, Jesus issues a single commandment: “Love one another.” This is not a sentimental love, but a love that holds people together through the very worst that life can dish out. It is also not a love that we manufacture of our own will or power, but a love that comes through our connection to the ultimate source of love, which is God as manifested in Jesus and God the Father. Jesus commands the disciples, and us, to abide in his love, to tap into the source of all life and love and keep that connection flowing all our days. Without that life- and love-giving connection, our love will wither and die. Expanding on this theme, some preachers may wish to discuss ways we can foster this connection outside of Sunday worship ? the day-by-day, hour-by-hour holy disciplines of meditating on scripture, prayer in its many varieties, and intentional service to others.
Application
Which commandments do we follow? Peter’s vision in Acts 10:10-16 changes the game by showing that Jewish dietary laws were no longer a standard of faithful discipleship. Peter’s staying on in Cornelius’ household for several days (Acts 10:48) further challenged Jewish laws and traditions that sought to keep social separations between Jews and Gentiles. As Jesus challenged the purity code of his day through his healings, preaching, and acceptance of hospitality, so Peter is brought into conflict with traditional Jewish notions and laws about who and what are pure or impure, clean or profane.
As a mother of a young child, I have a great deal of sympathy for purity codes ? they are meant to keep us safe and healthy. How many years of our lives do we devote to potty training, nose-wiping, checking temperatures, and deciding if kids are healthy enough to send to school? To cleaning: tubs and toilets, laundry, small wriggly bodies, dishes, snack debris encrusted on car seats, crumbs on the floor? To nagging: put your dirty laundry in the hamper, your dirty dishes in the washer, cold food back in the fridge, the lid back on the peanut butter jar, and please wash your hands! We may not follow Jewish law any more, but we all still have standards of hygiene that we try to teach our children so that they can grow strong and healthy.
But the Christian message is about so much more than survival; it is about love and amazing new life freed from laws that can become more burden than gift. As children, we need rules and structure to help keep us safe. As adults, we may find that the most loving and life-giving thing to do is to thoughtfully override those same rules. Mothers, and any loving caregiver of humans or animals, do this all the time as we cope with poop and pee, blood and vomit and spit and all the bodily functions we are trained to turn away from while growing up. Scientists seeking answers and remedies trudge through sewers and polluted waterways. Nurses and doctors and health aides deliberately encounter disease. Social workers, therapists, counselors invite the revelation of secrets, the naming of abuse and damage that others shy away from. Public safety officials go in where others flee. We have rules. But then, we have love. And, for many vocations, we also have training in how best to care for others ? places where love and rules meet and creatively find their best expression. Love transcends rules, but it need not obliterate them, any more than a loving mother would leave a dirty diaper unchanged or serve spoiled food to her guests. When we focus solely on the rules in our relationships with God and one another, we can miss the love that so often inspires those rules, and this is what Jesus came to correct. Sometimes rules have served their purpose and can be discarded, as Peter learned in his vision. Sometimes they are still a useful part of life in community. But God’s love, as a mother’s, sees so far beyond the keeping and breaking of rules. God’s love is for all people for all times, no matter who they are or what they have done. Jesus demonstrates this and invites us into this community of love, forgiveness, healing, and hope.
Alternate Application
Mother’s Day and readings on love may seem like a natural fit, but the pastoral realities of the day can be challenging. Some of us had wonderful mothers, others good-enough mothers, and others abusive mothers or mothers who abandoned us or put us up for adoption. Women and the men who love them will carry their own private histories of miscarriages, abortions, infertility, broken relationships with and/or the sickness or death of dearly loved children. Wikipedia reports: “The first attempts to establish a ‘Mother’s Day’ in the United States came from women’s peace groups. A common early activity was the meeting of groups of mothers whose sons had fought or died on opposite sides of the American Civil War. In 1868, Ann Jarvis, mother of Anna Jarvis, created a committee to establish a ‘Mother’s Friendship Day,’ the purpose of which was ‘to reunite families that had been divided during the Civil War.’ ”In Boston, near where I live, a Mother’s Day Walk for Peace honors homicide victims and their families, and seeks to counter the violence that wounds and kills so many children and young adults in our inner cities. Today, of any day, can be one to remember not to put our faith in human love, but in the love and mercy of God. We can give thanks for and celebrate the love of mothers and children, but that can be the beginning, not the end to calls to faithful life and action in a still-broken world.
Acts 10:44-48
Today’s short passage picks up where the Easter Sunday reading left off, with Peter’s speech to Cornelius’ household in Caesarea. While we hear Peter’s speech (Acts 10:34-43) every Easter Sunday, nowhere in the Revised Common Lectionary do we encounter the remarkable story of Peter and Cornelius told in Acts 10:1-33. It is worth telling this story, for its own amazing narrative of complementary visions in separate cities bringing the right people together at just the right moment, and for the profound importance this story had in the expansion of the early church. With a bit of planning, youth or adults could act out this story, which lends itself readily to a visual portrayal with its multiple characters, clear dialogue, and movements from one household to another. Acts 11:1-18 is read on Easter 5 of Cycle C in the Revised Common Lectionary, but it is also worth mentioning today how Peter’s experience challenged and then transformed the vision of the Jerusalem church. In today’s reading, we hear a second Pentecost story that encompassed not simply faithful Jews from all nations, as in the first day of Pentecost (Acts 2:5-11), but Gentiles, the non-Jewish believers. As the apostles praised God after hearing Peter’s story, “Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life” (Acts 11:23).
1 John 5:1-6
Who was Jesus, really? The Jewish Messiah, the Son of God? A mere mortal? An apparition? Somehow the Christian community to whom the author of 1 John was writing had become divided over this question. Two thousand-plus years into Christianity, we may forget or never realize how urgent this question was for the early church. While debates over Jesus’ true nature continue to this day, we know the answers the church has come to over the ages. I remember my amazement when I first learned of riots in the streets of Alexandria in the midst of the Arian controversy in the early 300s CE. Many people had many ideas about who exactly Jesus was and was not, and it took the church several centuries, and the interest of an emperor (Constantine), to come to a definitive statement at the Council of Nicaea.
Centuries before Nicaea, the community for whom this letter was written faced its own conflicts over who Jesus was. Some involved in the dispute had left the community, and those who remained struggled in the aftermath of the conflict; some may have been led to doubt their faith in Jesus, even as they remained within the fold. The exact nature of the dispute remains obscure, but from statements within the letter it seems to have had to do with the veracity of claims that Jesus was the fully human son of God who died and rose from the dead. Perhaps detractors had claimed Jesus was not fully human or had not really died on the cross.
The writer of this letter is clearly in the Johannine tradition, echoing the phrases and theology of the Gospel of John, including our reading today. “They will know we are Christians by our love” rings in the background of both Johannine readings today. Both lessons emphasize following God’s commandments, but the commandments to follow are simple: to love God and to love one another. The vast code of Jewish law no longer seems of interest. A new commandment has been given: Love.
John 15:9-17
Recall the context of these words of Jesus. He is sitting with his disciples after washing their feet at the Last Supper. Judas has already left the table. Soon they will all go out to the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus is about to be separated from his disciples forever in his physical, human form. With all that is to come ? betrayal, denial, judgement, death, it would be easy for his followers to turn on one another, point fingers, abandon this now lost and leaderless group of disciples. What is about to come is amazingly hard, shocking, and tragic. To prepare them, and as he says his farewells, Jesus issues a single commandment: “Love one another.” This is not a sentimental love, but a love that holds people together through the very worst that life can dish out. It is also not a love that we manufacture of our own will or power, but a love that comes through our connection to the ultimate source of love, which is God as manifested in Jesus and God the Father. Jesus commands the disciples, and us, to abide in his love, to tap into the source of all life and love and keep that connection flowing all our days. Without that life- and love-giving connection, our love will wither and die. Expanding on this theme, some preachers may wish to discuss ways we can foster this connection outside of Sunday worship ? the day-by-day, hour-by-hour holy disciplines of meditating on scripture, prayer in its many varieties, and intentional service to others.
Application
Which commandments do we follow? Peter’s vision in Acts 10:10-16 changes the game by showing that Jewish dietary laws were no longer a standard of faithful discipleship. Peter’s staying on in Cornelius’ household for several days (Acts 10:48) further challenged Jewish laws and traditions that sought to keep social separations between Jews and Gentiles. As Jesus challenged the purity code of his day through his healings, preaching, and acceptance of hospitality, so Peter is brought into conflict with traditional Jewish notions and laws about who and what are pure or impure, clean or profane.
As a mother of a young child, I have a great deal of sympathy for purity codes ? they are meant to keep us safe and healthy. How many years of our lives do we devote to potty training, nose-wiping, checking temperatures, and deciding if kids are healthy enough to send to school? To cleaning: tubs and toilets, laundry, small wriggly bodies, dishes, snack debris encrusted on car seats, crumbs on the floor? To nagging: put your dirty laundry in the hamper, your dirty dishes in the washer, cold food back in the fridge, the lid back on the peanut butter jar, and please wash your hands! We may not follow Jewish law any more, but we all still have standards of hygiene that we try to teach our children so that they can grow strong and healthy.
But the Christian message is about so much more than survival; it is about love and amazing new life freed from laws that can become more burden than gift. As children, we need rules and structure to help keep us safe. As adults, we may find that the most loving and life-giving thing to do is to thoughtfully override those same rules. Mothers, and any loving caregiver of humans or animals, do this all the time as we cope with poop and pee, blood and vomit and spit and all the bodily functions we are trained to turn away from while growing up. Scientists seeking answers and remedies trudge through sewers and polluted waterways. Nurses and doctors and health aides deliberately encounter disease. Social workers, therapists, counselors invite the revelation of secrets, the naming of abuse and damage that others shy away from. Public safety officials go in where others flee. We have rules. But then, we have love. And, for many vocations, we also have training in how best to care for others ? places where love and rules meet and creatively find their best expression. Love transcends rules, but it need not obliterate them, any more than a loving mother would leave a dirty diaper unchanged or serve spoiled food to her guests. When we focus solely on the rules in our relationships with God and one another, we can miss the love that so often inspires those rules, and this is what Jesus came to correct. Sometimes rules have served their purpose and can be discarded, as Peter learned in his vision. Sometimes they are still a useful part of life in community. But God’s love, as a mother’s, sees so far beyond the keeping and breaking of rules. God’s love is for all people for all times, no matter who they are or what they have done. Jesus demonstrates this and invites us into this community of love, forgiveness, healing, and hope.
Alternate Application
Mother’s Day and readings on love may seem like a natural fit, but the pastoral realities of the day can be challenging. Some of us had wonderful mothers, others good-enough mothers, and others abusive mothers or mothers who abandoned us or put us up for adoption. Women and the men who love them will carry their own private histories of miscarriages, abortions, infertility, broken relationships with and/or the sickness or death of dearly loved children. Wikipedia reports: “The first attempts to establish a ‘Mother’s Day’ in the United States came from women’s peace groups. A common early activity was the meeting of groups of mothers whose sons had fought or died on opposite sides of the American Civil War. In 1868, Ann Jarvis, mother of Anna Jarvis, created a committee to establish a ‘Mother’s Friendship Day,’ the purpose of which was ‘to reunite families that had been divided during the Civil War.’ ”In Boston, near where I live, a Mother’s Day Walk for Peace honors homicide victims and their families, and seeks to counter the violence that wounds and kills so many children and young adults in our inner cities. Today, of any day, can be one to remember not to put our faith in human love, but in the love and mercy of God. We can give thanks for and celebrate the love of mothers and children, but that can be the beginning, not the end to calls to faithful life and action in a still-broken world.
