Fifth Sunday of Easter
“I give you a new commandment: love one another.” Jn. 13:34
We Americans love to call ourselves “Christian.”
Even while uttering bigoted, hate-filled expressions – even after committing the deliberate and egregious acts of vengeance and cruelty again and again – we love to assure everyone that we are Christians, followers of Christ and living examples of a way of life modeled by Jesus of Nazareth.
And yet, as Rev. Jim Wallis writes in his powerful new book entitled America’s Original Sin: “We frequently call violence committed by foreign nationals against Americans terrorism, but usually not the violence we commit against one another – especially the historic white violence against blacks and Native Americans.”
In today’s gospel reading, after calling his disciples to follow him, after feeding them and teaching them and praying for them, and after allowing them to witness miracles the likes of which none of us has ever seen – after all this, Jesus dines with them, washes their feet, and urges each of them to imitate him by doing the same to one another.
After all this, Jesus then speaks his farewell words to them: “I give you a new commandment: love one another.”
These words summarize everything Jesus is about.
All of the gospels, all of the Old Testament, all of the story of Jesus’ death on a cross and resurrection to new life in God – all of it can be summed up in those final words he speaks to his disciples: “I give you a new commandment: love one another.”
Why a new commandment?
I would suggest three reasons:
First: If we love one another with the love with which Jesus has loved us, we cannot fail to experience his presence in our lives. That kind of love is contagious. It spreads like wildfire and inspires and transforms others. It’s the kind of love that constitutes our whole identity to such an extent that St. Paul tells us it will “open the door of faith to the Gentiles,” to the whole world – so much so that “we will know they are Christians by their love.”
Second: In order to live by the standards of Christian love, it is necessary to resist our culture determining the way in which today’s society lives. Just as in the time of Jesus, when his new commandment was in total opposition to the mandates of imperial Rome. Empires are not built on the conviction of loving one another but rather on the belief system that might is right, that greed is the ultimate god, and that human beings are mere subjects to be used for the benefit of the powerful.
Sadly, that same philosophy is still prominent in much of our world today.
Like Jesus and his disciples, we must resist that culture of greed and self-service and violence in our own time; we must have nothing to do with that part of our culture that demeans other people in the name of Jesus Christ.
Third: In all our talk about loving one another and holding that up as our ideal, each of us needs to thoroughly examine our conscience and ask ourselves honestly how well we have succeeded in investing love with its true meaning based on the spirit and concrete attitudes of Jesus.
Is ours a “love” that is ready to serve and to struggle against all that dehumanizes people and makes them suffer?
The kind of love that Jesus calls us to live is one that brings light to the world, not darkness; one that emphasizes hope, not fear; one that treasures courage, not cowardice; one that shouts out victory, not defeat.
Rev. Wallis underlines all of this when he concludes: “In the end, we (Americans) can and must shed ourselves of our idols and divisions that have bound and separated us, and find our dignity together as the children of God all made in the image of the One who loves us all.”
To put it another way, we all are in need of a conversion, a change of heart – not unlike that of the slave trader whose faith in Christ opened his eyes to his hideous desecration of other human beings and led him to write one of the most powerful of all hymns to tell his story:
“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now I’m found,
Was blind, but now I see.”
Let our prayer today be that we will all have that same experience of a new kind of sight – a vision so restored by the light of God’s love that we embrace fully that “new commandment: love one another.”
Ted Wolgamot, Psy.D.
11809194.1
4/20/16
