Listen to these lyrics of popular songs,
“All you need is love”
“All you need is love”
“What the World needs now is Love sweet love”
“Love is the answer”
If popular songs are any indication of a culture’s belief and
values, we are a culture convinced of Love’s preeminence. Love is the most
transcendent experience a human being can have. Of all things in this world
love seems nearest to divine. Indeed scripture itself teaches us, “God is Love”
and today in our gospel lesson Jesus tells us, “A new commandment I give you,
that you love one another as I have loved you.” But here is a question: What is
love?
In our culture, love is at risk of becoming a sentimental
platitude without any real depth. Love is often so closely associated with
feeling and emotion as to be almost narcissistic, as if the main reason we
should love other people is the enjoyment it gives us.
Part of the problem is that our English word can be rather
broadly interpreted. One uses the same word to say, “I love my mother, I love
my wife, or I love peanut butter chocolate Easter eggs, but each of these uses actually
express something quite different.
Greek has four different words for what we call love. The
first is Storge which is affection or fondness through familiarity. We
sometimes use the word “like” in these instances, but when the feelings are
stronger we say love. The second is Philia as Philadelphia “the city brotherly
love.” This is the love of friendship. The third is Eros which is romantic love,
the love of husband and wife. Finally there is agape which is sometimes
translated as charity. This is the generous, unconditional, self-sacrificial,
love that God has for us.
This is also the word Jesus uses when he commands us to love
one another. This kind of love is more than sentiment—although it can certainly
have feelings of tenderness and warmth associated with it—more than anything
this love is an action. This is why Jesus can command it of us.
He is our pattern and example and we are called to be
imitators of him. He demonstrates for us the true meaning of love. Jesus does
more than merely utter platitudes. He shows in a concrete way through his
actions what true love is. As the letter of 1 John says, ‘let us not love in
word or speech but in deed and in truth.’ This is precisely what Jesus did in
tying a towel around his waste and stooping to wash the feet of his disciples.
This is the action not of a master, but of a slave. Christ is
here performing the most menial task. He is not afraid to take the despised
position because Love is humble. It does not seek its own good but the good of
the other. Just this Sunday we read from Paul’s letter to the Philippians where
we are instructed to have the mind of Christ, who although he was in the form
of God, emptied himself and took the form of a servant. What more fitting
illustration of the self-sacrificial love of Christ can there be than this?
He rose from the table and set aside his cloak and
took up a towel, just as he had set aside the power and splendor of his
divinity to clothe himself in our human nature. As the Early church father Severian
wrote,“He who wraps the heavens in clouds wrapped round himself a towel; he who pours the water into the rivers and pools tipped some water into a basin. And he before whom every knee bends in heaven and on earth and under the earth, knelt to wash the feet of his disciples.”
It is this kind of humility, sacrifice, and selflessness that characterized the whole of Jesus’ life and finds its consummation in his suffering and death. His whole life is like broken bread and wine poured out for the life of the world and the glory of his father.
Jesus knew that his hour was coming. Our text says, “having
loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.’ This could mean
simply that Jesus kept on loving his disciples until the end of his life, but
we know that his love for us endured beyond the hour of his death and that
neither death nor life can separate us from his love.
It can also mean that
he loved them to the uttermost, or that he loved them with every drop of his
being. Jesus himself said, ‘Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down
his life for his friends.’
This is the kind of love that Jesus calls us to
have. Christ calls us to do more than fulfill the law in loving our neighbor as
ourselves; he challenges us to go deeper, to love God and our neighbor more
than our own life. Can you imagine what a community of people who loved like
that can accomplish? This is the kind of love—the radical self-giving—that will
make the world stand up and take notice. Such love is only possible through the
power of the Holy Spirit. Brothers and Sisters, let us love one another as he
has loved us.
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