Text: John 15:9-17
In the name of the (+) Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
It’s not often you can follow up a homily delivered at the Family Service with one at our more formal services, but I’d quite like to have a go. Perhaps some of you were there last week when I told the sorry story of our Christmas tree and its frankly rather embarrassing outing to the kerbside in the green waste bin a week or so ago. For those of you who missed it, let me briefly say that my attempt to have it collected was a dismal failure, and it languishes – still! – in our garage. It is a sad sight indeed, its branches largely stripped of needles, a reminder (as if we needed one) that Christmas is long-gone, and will be a long time coming yet. Its dead branches took me to the image of the vine, and what branches which are cut off from the life of the tree (or the vine) look like. They do not bear the intended leaves; they do not blossom or bear fruit. We are not to be like my Christmas tree, but as branches of Christ himself, the true vine. We are called to be one with him.
Our Gospel reading today follows on from Jesus’ words last week. The central theme remains abiding. This word, abiding, is the key to understanding the way to sustain the Christian life. Last week we were told to abide in Jesus just as he abides in us. How are we to do this? Well, this week we find out: the way that we abide in Jesus’ love for us is to keep his commandments, just as Jesus himself keeps his Father’s commandments and so abides in his Father’s love. Jesus and his Father are bound together by a unity of love for each other. In turn, this is what Jesus wills for us with him. We are thus caught up in a kind of chain of love, being drawn by it into the divine family. And if we are called into this new relationship, then we cannot be called servants any more. The Greek word δουλος is more correctly translated as “slave” – so in fact the contrast is even greater. In fact, while we are dealing with linguistics, the word we translate as “abide” – μενω – doesn’t convey the full meaning of the Greek idea. To abide, or to dwell, has the sense of existing fully and completely, without any need for more. Jesus’ love, then, is like the air we breathe – entirely sufficient for our needs.
So when we’re called, as we are here, to love one another to the point of laying down our lives for our friends, we need not fear that this will deprive us of life. The use of this phrase of Jesus’ on so many war memorials (much in mind at this time as we commemorate the 70th anniversary of VE Day) has perhaps associated it too much with the death of the body, whether in glorious sacrifice on the battlefield or in quieter ways such as Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan who volunteered to die in place of a stranger at Auschwitz. But it has a wider sense, too. Everything you do for someone else out of love is an act of laying down your own life. You cast it aside for that other person, building their life up by spending your own. This is quite a challenge in a society which is so acquisitive and focused on the rights of the individual, rather than of the community. But when we give our lives away out of love, we discover that we are drawn closer to the God who calls us all his friends, and to those from whom we might previously have been alienated because of our hardness of heart.
This isn’t always easy, of course. We are called to love one another – all of us – like Jesus has loved us. This means we must love those we do not find easy to love, too. We won’t always get that warm fuzzy feeling afterwards, either: some people are very difficult to like. Some people are hard work. But every day, we must seek to renew our feelings of love towards those who Jesus calls his friends.
St Augustine once said to “love, and do what you will”. This might sound like a licence for unrestricted freedom and hedonism, but it isn’t. If we love first before anything else, then everything that we do will be in the light of that love. It becomes the lens through which we see the world, and which focuses all our actions. That’s not a bad way of approaching life, but it requires work. We must make a conscious and regular commitment to those we love. We have an obvious opportunity this week in the form of the little red envelopes of Christian Aid. But there will be many other ways to show our love: why not take a moment each day to plan some act of random kindness (ARK)? Perhaps combine this with a short time of prayer – even just a few minutes – to share this with the one who loves us beyond anything we can imagine.
And as we draw near to the altar of our salvation to receive the love of God broken and poured out for us through the Body and Blood of his Son, and sustained by this love, let us go out and bear fruit by laying down our lives for one another.
And may “glory be to God whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.”
In the name of the (+) Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Grasping at Holiness 