“By This Everyone Will Know”

John 13:31-35

31 When he had gone out, Jesus said, "Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. 32 If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. 33 Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, 'Where I am going, you cannot come.' 34 I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." 

When I sat down Monday morning to plan worship and read over this week’s lectionary Scriptures, I was surprised to see this passage since we had just meditated on it a few weeks ago on Maundy Thursday as we gathered together to celebrate Jesus’ last supper with his disciples, the passage from where the “Maundy” in Maundy Thursday comes—the commandment, the mandate from Christ for us to love each other just as we have been so greatly loved by him.

I think it was so important for the disciples gathered in the upper room that last night before Jesus’ death to be commanded to love. They had been following Jesus for so long now, getting used to that life and those ways, but they were about to walk into something new, a post-crucifixion world that would look different and sound different and feel different. Jesus had been with them, teaching them, showing them, explaining to them how to love as he met with people—as he healed them and fed them, as he welcomed them and named them, as he invited them and forgave them. Jesus told them that he would only be with them a little longer, and then he would be gone—that all of this would then be their deal. They had been taught, and now it was their turn to go on without him, their turn to go out into the world and show the love of their Lord.

In our NRSV version of this passage, Jesus says to them, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you should also love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Our NRSV translates the Greek so well in many circumstances, but in this one, it’s a bit lacking. It says that we “should” go out and love one another, “should” kind of sounding like a suggestion. But the Greek for that word suggests something much deeper, saying that Jesus has loved us in order that we go out and love one another. This translation is much clearer—it is not a suggestion, but a mandate. I have loved you in order that you will go out and love one another.

This is not a new commandment for the disciples, for all of us. The commandment is there from the very beginnings of Scripture. In the 19^th chapter of Leviticus, we are told by the Lord that “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The commandment to love resounds throughout our Biblical story, but it takes on a new meaning when Jesus says it as his life is drawing to a close. The newness in this mandate to love can be found in the reason why we are called to love: that God loved us so much that a Son was given—given to live for us, given to die for us, given to rise for us. The newness in this mandate comes with the new life found on the empty cross and in the empty tomb, comes with the new life of resurrection.

I think it’s so important for us to read and hear this mandate anew this day, this commandment to the disciples to go out and love, to read it in concert with the commandment at the empty tomb for the disciples to go out and tell the good news of resurrection. It’s so important for us to read and hear these commandments together because you can’t have one without the other. It’s not enough to simply to go out and speak the good news of resurrection—what good is it going to do if we go out and speak the words but do absolutely nothing to back them up? We are not called to simply share the good news of resurrection, but called to live the good news, to show and share the good news, to embody it in such a way that everything we do shows the good news of life, of resurrection, of love. We are called to let that good news take root in us, so that it emanates from the very core of our being, so that it lives through us. Called to embody it in every action so that everyone will know we are disciples of our resurrected Christ before a word is ever on our tongue.

There was a very sweet, gentle, kind man who was a member of my former church, and I did his memorial service after he died from a short but very valiant battle with pancreatic cancer. Bill was a true disciple in every sense of the word—he welcomed folks, invited them to his table and made meals for them, healed them as he listened to them and prayed for them, as he never met a stranger. He was a disciple who embodied this kind of love —evident as a co-worker spoke at his service. She said, “Bill never flat out told me that he was a Christian, but I just knew it by the way he treated folks in our office. He was pretty high up and didn’t need to do anything he did, but he took the time to stop by our desks every day, to ask us how we were, to ask about our families, to tell us that he would pray for us when times were rough. He asked us to lunch when we didn’t have any other invitations. He treated us with gentleness and grace and forgiveness. It wasn’t always easy, and I’m sure he was tired at times, but that never stopped him. He loved us deeply because he had been so deeply loved.” Wow. His words and actions as a disciple were entwined—he embodied the love of Christ, lived it to the very core of his being. By that, everyone knew that he was a disciple. It was amazing to hear that story, and I thought to myself, “How different would our world be if we all embodied that forgiveness and grace, that acceptance and kindness and love?”

“I give you a new commandment,” Jesus says, “that you love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Frederick Buechner speaks about this kind of love, this embodied love, as he says:

To lose yourself in another’s arms, or in another’s company, or in suffering for all [of those] who suffer, including the ones who inflict suffering upon you—to lose yourself in such ways is to find yourself. Its what it’s all about. Its what love is…in the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion, but an act of will. When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling…on the contrary, he is telling us to love our neighbors in the sense of being willing to work for their well-being even if it means sacrificing our own well-being to that end, even if it means sometimes just leaving them alone. Thus in Jesus’ terms, we can love our neighbors without necessarily liking them. In fact liking them may stand in the way of loving them by making us overprotective sentimentalists instead of reasonably honest friends.

Buecher reminds us that love is not often comfortable, not often cozy, not often easy. While love may be all of those things at times, there are so many others when love is hard work, hard stuff, self-sacrificing gut-wrenching stuff. There are so many times when loving means looking into the face of an enemy and realizing, proclaiming even, that they are also a child of God. So many times when love means sitting at table with someone that we don’t want to accept. So many times when we feast at the table with folks who don’t look like us or act like us, folks who don’t worship the same way we do or don’t worship at all, folks who weren’t born in the same place as us and don’t speak the same language, folks who live and love differently than we do. Isn’t that, after all, what the cross is all about? About hard work? About self-sacrifice? About acceptance of those whom we deem unjust but whom God deems just? About the forgiveness and grace and abundance that comes with love? About loving others—even when we don’t necessarily like them—but because we have first been loved so greatly by God?

I read an amazing letter this week, one that must have been hard and horrible to write, to even imagine. This letter speaks about the kind of resurrection forgiveness and love that our risen Christ mandates us to live, to embody. It was written by a Jesuit priest to the surviving brother responsible for last week’s awful bombings. Here is some of what was written in the letter:

Dear Dzhokhar,

You don’t know me, but you tried to kill my family. You couldn't have known, but my brother ran…in the marathon and trained for months. My sister-in-law was an amazing and supportive wife as she always is and was ready to run the last 5 miles with him. Your bomb was at the finish line that they were trying to cross.

My mother, father and sister were waiting for them at the finish line. You didn't know it, but my mother thinks that she saw you down there. My sister is only three years younger than you, and you set off a bomb in front of her.

You don't know me, but you tried to kill some friends of mine. One of my best…friends was working in the store in front of which you or your brother laid down a bomb. That bomb exploded, and gave her the worst day of her life. I was a high school teacher, your bomb wounded one of my most promising students with shrapnel.

Dear Dzhokhar…you killed a child who was a part of the community who made me the man I am today…You tried to drive a city which gave me courage in the face of cancer into complete and utter fear…Dear Dzhokhar, for all of this, I can't hate you... Today I thought about the fact that you are only 19 ... you are just a kid. You must have been so afraid. You were a victim like so many are victims. You were brought something you shouldn't have been brought into because you likely didn't and couldn't know any better.

I am glad that you are going to prison, and I hope that you will have many long years there in supermax in Colorado. I hope that no one I love will ever be threatened by you again, but I can't hate you. I can't hate you because whatever you brought into Boston was enough hate for a good long while, I won't and can't hate any more. I can't hate you because I remember being 19, I thought many things were a good idea which weren't. I never would have went where you were with that, but I was certainly not an adult at 19.

I can't hate you because, even though you did unspeakable things ... somehow you are still my brother and your death can never be my gain.

I can't hate you, and not just because I am a Catholic, and a Christian, and because in a couple of months I will be a priest, I am a human and I simply can't hate you.

Dear Dzhokhar, I still have hope for you.

The rest of your life will be in prison. I have seen men change their lives there. I hope that you won't be executed, because I know that we can hold you, safely, for the rest of your life.

I can't say what your story might be there but I know that I, as a Christian, and you, as a Muslim, believe God to be merciful... so I can't help but have hope for you...

Dear Dzhokhar, I will pray for you. Next year, when my friend and my brother cross that finish line on Boylston, your brother's cause will have lost for good, but I will pray that you will know, somehow still, the love that my brother, sister-in-law, mother, father, sister, friends, and students all have given me.

Dear Dzhokhar, I will pray for you that you will come to know that PEACE and LOVE are the only ways in which world will ever be changed.

Dear Dzhokhar, I don't and can't hate you. I am glad you are in custody, but you are just a kid, and you are lost. I will love and pray for you, because somehow your sin was turned for good, and my community and the people I love will only be stronger in the end.

Dear Dzhokhar, Godspeed.

Wow. I pray that you will come to know that peace and love are the only ways the world will ever be changed. I will love you and pray for you that your sin will be turned into good. What amazing words of grace and forgiveness and peace. What amazing words of love. That, friends, is how we celebrate that we are people of the Christ’s resurrection—by accepting, by hoping, by loving. That is how we celebrate and live as Easter people. That is how we flourish with love, how we embody love, how we let love root deeply into our souls, all because we are Easter people. “I have loved you,” Christ says, “in order that you also love one another.” This is not always a love that is easy or comfortable or comforting, but it is a love that we are commanded, mandated to live. It is a love that is first given to us on the cross, a love that comes with the miracle of the resurrection, a love that is so essential to us that it becomes part of who we are—a love that emanates from every fiber of our being. It is a love that will be one of the only things that ever changes the world. It is a love by which everyone will know we are disciples. It is a love that passes all understanding because it comes from God. And thanks to be God for that. Amen.