Love Like Jesus
from John 13: 1-17, 21b-35
Very early in my ministry, I learned that many people have great trouble with the kind of confession we used tonight. They reported that when they were teenagers, facing all sorts of questions about self-worth and having sexual thoughts and feelings that made them uncomfortable, confessing that they were by nature sinful and unclean led them to believe they were terrible people. Some felt confessing sin damages the self-respect and confidence they need to enjoy life.
At the time, I thought one way to counter this was to emphasize that the great commandment is really about loving 3 people: God, neighbor, and yourself. When Jesus said to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and soul and to love your neighbor as you love yourself, he was calling for us to care for the neighbor as we care for ourselves.
I felt pretty good about this until a number of my younger members reported that they thought their very popular national organization supported me when they used the slogan “Love God first, others second, and yourself last.” That, of course, was not what I thought Jesus meant. He did not ask us to put ourselves down, but rather to raise other people up.
Before long, I also became concerned with people who do not love themselves in a healthy manner. The great commandment doesn’t work if you’re an ego-maniac. If you think you are the greatest that ever lived, as some of our present leaders claim every day, there’s no room left to love others.
On the other hand, if you hate yourself, the commandment doesn’t work either. If we think we are failures, we have no business treating other people like we treat ourselves.
That’s when I came to really appreciate tonight’s gospel. It’s John’s way to handle the problem. At the Last Supper, he has Jesus modify the Love Commandment. The other three gospels include “love your neighbor as you love yourself.” John has “Love each other as I love you.” Jesus becomes the definition of love, not how we feel.
John has no Sermon on the Mount. He has no parables like the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son. In fact, he has no teachings at all about the Christian lifestyle, like turning the other cheek, giving to anyone who asks you for anything, or loving your enemy. He only has two challenging illustrations of love.
The first is Jesus washing his followers’ feet. He says we should think of ourselves as the servants of others, too. Think of yourself as a servant employed by everyone else in the room. This is how Jesus sees himself. He represents God who cares for all of us, so even the greatest among us should serve the least, not mock them.
The second illustration is Jesus dying for us. He repeats his love commandment in the 15th chapter with “Love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” He represents God when he sacrifices everything for us, so we should be willing to suffer for other people.
That’s it! Two illustrations that leave us breathless. John doesn’t mean we shouldn’t love ourselves. He is simply saying that it does not always define what he means by love. God defines love, not how we feel. In his first letter, John says God is love, and Jesus represents God in the ways he loves us, serving us even if it means his death. So too our love is to be unconditional.
We gather at a time when many powerful voices in our government claim this type of love is toxic; that’s their word, not mine. They believe sacrificing for others prevents the strong from achieving what is needed to advance humanity. The strong should not waste their time serving the weak but use their strength to get what they think will benefit themselves and their own kind. That kind of thinking has brought us to the point where we constantly hear, “I am stronger than you, so you had better do what I want, or I will destroy you.” And in recent weeks, that has become “We (that “we” supposedly includes all of us) are more powerful than you are, so you better do what we say, or we will kill you.”
In the face of this, we must proclaim that Jesus speaks for God when he tells us to love one another as he loves us. We are to take time to care for even the least among us because that is what God does.
Our liturgy has us leaving this service in silence. We should be clear that the silence is not so much because we acknowledge our sin, but rather because God’s unconditional love overwhelms us with our responsibility to love one another.
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