John Archives - Kyle Matthew Oliver

(Acts 10:44-48; Psalm 98; 1 John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17)

In chapter 14 of John’s gospel, Jesus says these familiar words: “If ye love me, keep my commandments.” That’s a pretty tall order, no? Kind of a lot of pressure?

It gets even more incredible when we arrive at today’s elaboration on what those commandments actually are. Here in this morning’s passage, Jesus gets to the point: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”

Oh is that all?

Actually no. Jesus continues, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

Those are some seriously high expectations. If Jesus is the example we’re shooting for, we seem doomed to fail. And yet that is his commandment to us.

How can we think differently about texts that can seem so unrealistic? How can we make sense of the idea of loving “on command”?

Those of you who came to the rector’s forum on Anglican thought a few weeks ago know I have a fondness for Richard Hooker, arguably the first great Anglican theologian. Hooker has a helpful perspective here, because he sees law and commandment as an especially suitable metaphor for God.

The created order is held in being according to law, says Hooker. Here’s the line from his masterwork that interprets everything that follows: “[t]he being of God is a kinde of lawe to his working: for that perfection which God is, geveth perfection to that he doth” (Lawes I.2.1). Boy is that an Elizabethan mouthful. Here’s the gist:

Hooker says that what God is, who God is, is reflected throughout the great chain of being: angels, humans, animals, plants, rocks, seas, everything. God’s law connects God’s works one to the other and carries God’s perfection to them. God is a sort of wellspring of order, structure, right relationship.

So we do not so much comply with the law or obey the commandment to love one another. Notice that in the language of our gospel reading we keep the commandments, we abide in God’s love.

This is language of reception: love is a gift. It comes to us and to all creation from our Creator.

This is language of participation: to love is simply to get swept up by God’s love, be pulled along by it, become woven into its very fabric—and it into ours.

Here the familiar words of the King James Version serve us poorly, hiding the meaning John seems to be getting at. “If ye love me, keep my commandments” is not supposed to be a threat or a guilt trip or even a challenge.

It’s a promise: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments, it will just sort of follow.” That’s better but still imperfect.

What’s the alternative? Well, I don’t know, and I think that’s why these writings of John’s community (the gospel and the letters) are so circular and repetitive. There’s always more to say. We can never quite capture it.

For my part, I’d want to put it this way: Loving Christ and keeping his commandments are the same thing.

Loving one another as God has loved us is less a matter of imitation or even grateful response than it is of recognizing God, assenting to Christ’s presence in us. I appreciate Henri Nouwen’s point that God’s love is the first love and we share and return our own. But I think it’s better to say that there is only one love. It is of God and is God. We do best to notice it with gratitude and let it do its work in us.

We are included in a community of love, of obedience to this commandment in the fullest and deepest sense, when we receive the gift of the Spirit and become one with the Savior who is law and love already for us and in us.

OK, we need to bring this conversation with scripture out of the stratosphere. Let’s make it a bit more concrete by considering, I presume, an all too familiar example.

Let’s think about our overbearing coworker, or our unpleasant relative, or someone who simply gets our goat on a regular basis.

Knowing that love for such people is, shall we say, elusive, we tend to focus on “loving actions.” We can do our best to relate well, putting our frustrations aside and focusing on the task at hand in those times we need to be together. We can go out of our way to practice kindness, smiling, doing favors, remaining open, and essentially pretending we love this person until it sort of becomes a habit and sticks.

I’m a huge proponent of this approach. But there are certain folks for whom we just can’t get it off the ground, people with whom we’re so defensive or uncomfortable or outright hostile that the very thought of “fake it ‘til you make it” love seems almost laughable.

This is when I try to take my shortcoming to God in prayer, abandoning “loving action” to grasp at “loving response”: “Oh God, you have showered me with so many blessings, forgiven me so many evils, loved me so totally and completely. Help me to extend just a fraction of that generosity toward this insufferable human being …”

You probably see where I’m going here. If the love depends on us, there are always going to be people with whom we come up short. No amount of meditation on the sufferings of Christ or the unshakable faithfulness of the God of our ancestors seems to get us over the hump.

Sometimes, the best thing we can do to love someone is admit to God that we can’t. Sometimes, maybe more often than we think, our prayer should be something like this:

“God, I do not know how to love John in accounting, or cousin Sally, or that neighbor whose dog always poops in my yard. It is beyond me. But I know it is not beyond you. I know you already have a love for this person that is vast, complete, and unconditional. When it is time, please share it with me.”

For my money, that’s the only prayer that has a chance with the people who drive us nuts, to say nothing of those who have hurt or abused us.

Jesus’s commandment that we love one another only makes sense when we accept that the love of God and neighbor is a gift of grace. It is already present in and through the created order, in which we are all interconnected. It is already present by the Word of God, Christ who is all and in all. It is already present by the power of the Holy Spirit, Christ’s own first gift for those who believe.

The love of God is already in us. We keep the commandment of Christ by giving ourselves over to it as best we can, as often as we can.

Image credit: “if ye love me” by Tom Woodward via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Lent 5, Year C (John 12:1–8)

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Image source: Stephanie Watson CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

I was speaking recently with a teacher at a religious high school. She had been studying this passage from John’s gospel with her students and was both charmed and surprised by their reaction. The conversation had apparently become totally unglued by the class’s collective dismay at Jesus’s final words: “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”

“How can he say that?” they asked. I think they sensed in his words either an indifference to a tragic fact or a hopelessness in the face of a challenge that Jesus could have solved. After all, he has just raised poor Lazarus from the dead; surely with a strategic loaves and fishes campaign he could have raised the poor’s standard of living. And that 300 denarii for the perfume could have been important seed money.

But I don’t want to pick on my friend’s students, because in many ways I agree with them. Like so many of my fellow Midwesterners, I have a pronounced cultural discomfort with luxury and ostentatious displays of wealth. Insert Garrison Keillor joke here. I’m very much the son of two parents who went out shopping for what they called “a midlife crisis car” but who came back not with the Mustang or Charger they’d imaged but with a Volkswagon Cabrio. It’s the world’s most sensible convertible.

And there’s nothing sensible about Mary’s action in this story, at least not at first glance. To even possess a jar of perfume worth a year’s wages is very strange for a woman we assume was poor, so strange that one commentator speculates that it must have been a “family treasure” (209). Of course, Judas’s disingenuous suggestion still stands in that case: why not give this wealth away to those in need? And why squander it so wantonly on a sentimental act, especially toward someone who has carefully avoided the trappings of wealth and power?

The answer Jesus gives is all about preparation. “Jesus said, ‘Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial.’” We’ve all just had an encounter with the stench of death, he seems to say, and another death is coming. Let this fragrance fill the room and remind us that the next death will make possible the royal victory for which I have been anointed.

So my answer to my friend’s students is that Jesus is neither indifferent to nor hopeless against the plight of people who are poor—then or now. However, in this luxurious scene, he is being prepared for a task he must accomplish for the whole world’s sake. Mary’s prophetic action draws our attention to the nature and the gravity of that work. Perhaps it’s even necessary, in a way, that Jesus be anointed now rather than in the tomb, for in John’s gospel, Jesus reigns not just from beyond the grave but from the cross, not with an anguished cry but with a dignified declaration: “It is finished.” However you look at it, though, the perfume incident only makes sense in light of what is to come.

So I wonder if we might, with apologies to Blessed John, read this story as a sort of parable of the season of Lent, a parable of our own preparation for what lies ahead. Though many in the church are fasting, Lent is in other ways a season of indulgence. The act of examination and repentance is an inward journey, requiring an almost lavish self-focus, for a time. I’ve noticed that the brief homilies I give at daily masses have followed that pattern, dwelling on our inner lives and our life as a congregation. And I know my own Lenten practice has been less about giving alms than about resting in God’s arms.

They warn us at the seminary that inward focus is a recipe for stagnation, because disciples, to be disciples, must ultimately look outward. Indeed, that idea will probably sound familiar to those of you who attended Canon Joey Rick’s presentation on evangelism and congregational vitality on Wednesday. The point is, if we’ve been dwelling on ourselves a bit more than usual of late, then it had better be to prepare for something bigger.

What are we preparing for? If the answer is just our experience of the Triduum and the Easter celebration that follows, then we’re not hearing the fullness of Jesus’s call for us to live lives of service to those in need.

What are we preparing for? If the answer is just that outpouring of peace and thanksgiving that comes with the sure knowledge of our forgiveness, then we’re living large on God’s gift of grace, a gift that imparts its full meaning not just when we receive it, but when we give it away.

What are we preparing for? Not just to be redeemed and sanctified, although we surely will be. We are preparing as well to be renewed and sent out, to be vessels of grace in a world that needs it now as ever.

The more I’ve thought about it this week, the more I’ve believed that we’re preparing to be like that little jar of perfume. Could that be true?

What if we are God’s precious investment, bought for a costly price indeed, but ultimately worth it because of our sacred purpose? If that’s true, it reminds us of the importance of this period of discernment in the life of St. Paul’s and our need to answer anew our questions of God’s purposes for us.

What if we are the oil of anointing for the sick and the suffering, marking those we serve with a sign of their true dignity and stature in the kingdom of God? If that’s true, then visiting parishioners who are ill and feeding neighbors who are hungry will become, more and more, not just our duty but our joy. Jesus, and my friend’s high school religion class, would approve.

What if we are the fragrance that fills this house of worship and then spills into the streets, making it possible for our neighbors to encounter in us the beauty of holiness? If that’s true, then our amazing Ash Wednesday experience might mark the beginning of a new chapter in the story of our life as friends and neighbors in Foggy Bottom.

What if we are holy vessels, chosen and sanctified for carrying to others the grace of God in Christ?
My sisters and brothers I pray that Lent continue to be, for us, forty luxurious days of preparation, so that when the time comes, we may follow the Risen Christ from “What if?”s to what’s next.

Tag: John

Loving “on command”

A parable of preparation