I love Jesus

Sermon for Easter VI, 2023, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY

Text: John 14:15-21

Every so often, I have heard someone declare with deep emotion that they love Jesus. And that is all that they say, leaving me hanging. It is hard for me to understand what they mean by loving Jesus, because I have understood love for someone to be between two physical people. How could you love someone who was no longer around, who you never met? And was this love romantic, or like friendship, or like someone you had married, or what, exactly? After hearing this for a while, I have sort of given up trying to understand what “I love Jesus” means, because I didn’t get it. Now, I would swoon over a picture of the beautiful actress Lauren Bacall, even though I had never been in her presence, but this is different. How could someone love Jesus? I began to understand this love when I read the Gospel passage we just heard this morning, and I began to understand when Jesus says “They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me.” But this sounds a little conditional, as if Jesus was saying that I had to keep his commandments if I was to love him. In other words, there is an obligation to do as he said if I am to claim that I love him. And that doesn’t sound quite like Jesus in other parts of the Gospels.

English doesn’t do such a good job with words for love, and by that I mean that we have the word love to describe, well, love. You see the problem with just one word for a variety of feelings. So, I looked at this Gospel passage in the original Greek it was written in and came across the word agapaté. Where Jesus says “If you love me…” he uses the word agapaté, which is related to the root word agapé. Agapé is described as a selfless, all-accepting, all-giving, unconditional love. It is God’s love, perfect and divine for someone regardless of who they are, love just because they exist. It is the basis for compassion, mercy, kindness, and altruism, all things that Jesus demonstrated as he healed, and befriended, and defended. This made more sense to me, where to say that “I love Jesus” is to show the same love, agapé, that he showed to the world when he was in it. But then there’s the first part of what he said, “Those who keep my commandments…”. How does this work, keeping commandments and loving Jesus?

Looking back to my homily this past Maundy Thursday, I shared three vignettes, three episodes in my life that showed me what unconditional love looked like. On that night so long ago, Jesus said to his disciples, “If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.” It was a commandment to love by serving humbly. Earlier in John’s Gospel, Jesus says, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” So the relationship between loving Jesus and his commandments becomes clear: to keep his commandments is to love others as he did. John goes on to write that Jesus said “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends,” which frames his death as the ultimate expression of love through self-sacrifice. We are not called to give up our lives, to die as a sign of the depth of love we have for our family, or friends, or strangers. Jesus was the one, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice. We are instead called to show his love to others as our response to Jesus’ sacrifice for us. We are called to keep his commandments as an acknowledgement of his love for us. There is no obligation to love Jesus that is part of our faith. Instead we recognize his love for us by loving him in return, and we do that through continuing to love and serve others as he did.

All of this loving and serving is hard, though. It means putting the needs of others ahead of our wants, and loving those who are difficult to have relationships with. I’m reminded of this on Thursdays when I join other volunteers with the Society of Saint Joseph of Arimathaea and we hold a short funeral and burial for someone. The deceased are often estranged from family and friends, and just as often surviving family members specifically decline to attend. I offer a short reflection during the service, and it is hard to find something loving to say about someone I don’t know and who made poor decisions, and yet not sound insincere myself. The only thing I know about that person is what Matthew, the local Catholic Charities coordinator, tells us about them. If we look at our faith in Jesus in that same way, as someone who was alive and is now gone, then that kind of faith would lead us to just a memory of him, that we recall when we read scripture. But, if we encounter the Advocate, the holy spirit of truth whom Jesus promised to send, we can encounter the living, resurrected Jesus through it. When my faith is in the living and resurrected Jesus, I can have faith in the living and the dead in this world, and love who the rest of the world says is unlovable. Through the Holy Spirit, I can love someone who I have never met and serve their last need on earth as an act of love.

This loving relationship I have with Jesus and with God by extension is a two-way, affirming relationship, made possible by the presence of the Holy Spirit within me and within us, and it makes sense. The Holy Spirit is a bridge between life here and life beyond death, hope here and hope beyond death. It does not replace Jesus’ presence on earth, but instead draws us into the Trinity, where we become aware of the timeless and everlasting life that Jesus ascended to. It is what inspires me to respond to Jesus’ sacrifice by following his commandments, and to keep my love for him alive. I am reminded of the inspiration of love at the end of the service, when I  dismiss you with a reminder of what Jesus said to his disciples about loving him and keeping his commandments. [Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.] That is what we are sent out of here to do in the world, to be able to say that we love Jesus through our actions and attitudes, ones that he commanded us to do and to hold, and not just say that we love him.

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