Paul Walker Christ Church 4/24/16 John 13:31 “You, I would die for you”

In our gospel reading this morning, Jesus gives his disciples a new commandment. The setting is the Last Supper. These are some of His final words to His followers. The new commandment is this: the disciples are to love one another, just as Jesus has loved them. He says there will be a kind of consequence to his new commandment. If they love one another, then after He is gone, everyone will know that they are His disciples. All you need is love.

You’ve got to wonder right off the bat, why is this injunction to love a new commandment? Love is hardly a new theme for Jesus. He summarizes the 10 commandments by saying to love God and love your neighbor. He says that you should love not only your friends, but also your enemies. So how is this commandment to love a new commandment?

It’s pretty obvious that the commandment to love is an important one, over and above the fact that it is Jesus’ deathbed wish. Almost everyone acknowledges that loving other people is a good thing, even a necessary thing for the good of a functioning society. From the Beatles to Buddha to Bonhoeffer, you will find the common thread of love. I went to see Prince in 1983; there was a lot of talk about love, although I think that kind of love had a different emphasis.

What makes Jesus’ command to love a new command is the qualifier. “Love one other as I have loved you.” This is what distinguishes this love from a general concept of love. How has Jesus loved his disciples, and by extension the world? Remember he is giving this command at the end of his life and the eve of his crucifixion. Jesus’ love is always cruciform; He loves others at the expense of Himself. The Good Shepherd expresses His love by laying down His life for His sheep.

As I said, the need for love is universally recognized, but what is less frequently admitted is how dang hard it is to actually love another person, especially the new, cruciform love that Jesus commands. Loving another person requires you to put that person’s needs and wants ahead of your own. Loving another person sometimes requires you go against your own pleasures or inclinations for the good of the other. This kind of love does not come naturally to human beings; that’s why it is hard to love another person.

It is, however, very easy to argue with another person. People can argue and any and everything. Anything can be the object of an argument, the tabula rasa upon which you chalk up the list of your own rights. Did you know that a recent study discovered that on average, a dog – a dog! - causes about 2000 arguments in it’s lifetime? Our Jack Russell puppy isn’t even a year old; I think we’re already pushing 1000 arguments about her. Throw in our old dog, who is quickly becoming a

grumpy old man, and our daughter’s dog who frequently visits and it feels like sometimes all we do is have “conversations” about dogs.

So much for Man’s Best Friend. And if Man’s Best Friend causes 2000 arguments, how exponentially do you multiply the arguments caused by the big sources of conflict? Money. Sex. Power. Family. How far back in time do you need to go to uncover a conflict around those? Most likely, you need dog years to fit in all the arguments surrounding even one of those topics into any average lifetime.

We argue because human love bears little resemblance to cruciform love, to the “as I have loved you” kind of love. Human love is conditional by nature. I know that parents and sometimes spouses will claim to love unconditionally, like the mother in the Runaway Bunny, or the father in the Prodigal Son parable. That is a great aspiration. I sure wish that I could love unconditionally. But, in reality, no one loves unconditionally, all the time. Offense after offense will eventually drain your limited reservoir of love dry.

In reality, human love is much more like the love expressed by Carlos Santana in the 1969 song “Evil Ways.” “You've got to change your evil ways, baby /Before I stop lovin' you / You've got to change, baby/And every word that I say is true.” A person can only take so much; accumulated pain eventually closes the heart’s door.

Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby recently discovered through a DNA test that his real father was not an alcoholic Jewish whiskey salesman, but instead an aristocrat who worked on Winston Churchill’s cabinet. The Archbishop was the result of a drunken one night fling. It was big tabloid news in the UK.

I was impressed by Welby’s insistence that the news didn’t change his basic identity, which he finds in Jesus Christ alone. But I was equally impressed by his articulation of human nature. As the Telegraph reported, “Welby’s response was extraordinary for it’s unabashed acceptance of the compromises that decorate most human relationships.” The compromises that decorate human relationships: you’ve got to chance your evil ways, baby, before I stop loving you.

Jesus says, “By this, everyone will know your are my disciples if you love one another.” I’m not sure we have obeyed his new commandment very well. A recent study of Millennials asked young people to free associate words with Christianity. The repeated answers were words like “judgment, self-righteousness, condemning.” These young people may not have realized the extent to which they are also judging, self-righteous, and condemning, but their answers indicate that the followers of Jesus, at least in perception, are a far cry from the Man who uttered the new command to love.

The good news imbedded in this bad news about our limited ability to love is that Christianity ultimately is not about us. As we say here, it is not about good people getting better. Instead, Christianity is for flawed people who need a Savior. Jesus

Christ is not Carlos Santana. Nor anyone else. Our evil ways do not repel him. When we do not change our evil ways, He keeps on loving us. In fact, right after he gives this command, he dies for the disciples who have abandoned him. What Jesus says on Thursday night, He does on Good Friday.

St. Paul grasped the difference between human love and God’s love. He say, “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Last week our preschoolers saw a stage version of The Runaway Bunny at the Paramount. One year old was impressed that the bunny’s mom became a tree in order to find the runaway bunny. Jesus Christ was nailed to a tree for the ungodly – you and me. He became sin, so that we would become righteous. All human arguments, past, present and future, are absolved in this man’s final words from the cross – “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Turns out that Prince knew about this kind of love too. In this song he speaks with the voice of the Prince of Peace. He sings, “You’re just a sinner I am told/ Be your fire when your cold/ Make you happy when you’re sad/Make you good when you are bad/ Cause, you, I would die for you/Yeah…you I would die for you.”

Amen.