A Sermon Delivered by
The Rev. John D. Painter
at Centenary United Methodist Church
Metuchen, New Jersey
May 17, 2009

Text: John 15:9-17
“As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my com-mandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.” —John 15:9-17, NRSV

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you (John 15:12–14; NRSV).

First there were the Ten Commandments, those epic “Thou shalt’s” and “Thou shalt not’s” written in stone atop Mount Sinai and delivered to Moses from the hand of God. Then came more than 600 lesser laws and regulations to guide everyday orthodox Jewish life. And, sometime in the first third of the 1st century of the Common Era (ca. 30 CE), when he was asked by the lawyers what was the first and most important commandment, Jesus answered with two—in priority order: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength…and, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Within the biblical story, it seems we have moved from 10 commandments, to over 600, and then to two. But the reduction is not over—yet. For on the last night of his life, while sitting around the table with his closest friends, Jesus offers what is his one, final, all-consuming injunc-tion: This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you (John 15:12, NRSV). Some have said that this is Jesus’ one and only commandment, and that if his followers can obey this one, then they will fulfill all of the others that have come before.

There are times when the Scriptures may frustrate us by offering veiled hints or broad suggestions. Sometimes Jesus’ words are not always easy to understand. (Although, as someone has said, “It is not the parts of the Bible I do not understand that trouble me so much as the parts I do understand.”) Sometimes Christian ethics offers a number of possible responses. Life can get pretty complicated. But here, in these words of Jesus, there is very little of veiled hints and broad suggestions; his words are not hard to understand; and, there aren’t a whole lot of options to ponder. Jesus puts it to his disciples—and to us—in pretty simple terms: Love one another.

I suspect that there are some here this morning who have doubts and confusions about the Christian faith. Take heart. In the Gospel of John, doubts, questions, beliefs and ideas are impor-tant. But in today’s passage, as Jesus is preparing to depart from his disciples and go in obedi-ence to his death, Jesus simply commands his disciples to obey him, to love him by living as he instructs them.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus doesn’t ask us to believe complex, difficult things about him. He asks simply that we obey him. I hope this is good news to you, because, sometimes, if you can’t understand Jesus, you can at least obey Jesus!

“To be a Christian, a follower of Jesus (someone who is baptized) means that there are some things for us that are not optional.” A person who is a disciple of Jesus is someone who, in every situation, tries to respond to other people as Jesus responded. “There may be certain re-sponses to the world that, in the world’s eyes, ‘make sense,’ or which can simply be justified by reference to ‘everyone else is doing it.’ But Christians are those who, through baptism, have signed on, have publicly committed themselves to obey Jesus. And Jesus has commanded us to love.

“Whether our obedience to this command will make the world a better place, or lead to deeper human understanding, or help to win friends and influence people we know not. We only know, in today’s Scripture as well as so many other places in the New Testament, that this is clearly what Jesus commands us to do.

“Not that it is always easy to know exactly what loving one another means. Sometimes our love needs to be that sort of ‘tough love,’ of which we sometimes speak. Yet hate, violence, revenge, and the other means through which the world gets what it wants, are not options for Je-sus’ people, people who are commanded to love.”

From 1955 to 1981, the Rev. Ernest Gordon was Dean of the Chapel at Princeton Univer-sity. But Dean Gordon may have been better known for his chronicles of the Second World War in the Pacific through his book, Through the Valley of the Kwai, in which he describes spending a large part of World War II as a prisoner-of-war in Thailand on the banks of the river Kwai. It was here, under “conditions worse than you could imagine,” that Ernest Gordon began to dis-cover his faith.

He worked on a railway which the Japanese were building. Over 12,000 allied prisoners died of starvation building the railway. Gordon says their worst enemy was not the Japanese but themselves. The law of the jungle took over among them. They stole from each other, and in-formed on each other to win favors from the Japanese. Morale was at rock bottom. Two men whose faith kept them going decided to try to do something. They organized Bible reading and discussion groups. They met at night and at first the numbers were small but after not too long the numbers grew to the hundreds. When reading the Bible they noticed that Jesus faced the same problems as themselves, he often had no place to lay his head, no food for his belly, no friends in high places. He too had known bone-weariness from too much toil, the suffering, re-jection and disappointments that are part of the fabric of life. Everything about Jesus began to make sense. The prisoners underwent a change of heart and stopped destroying one another as they had been doing. Reading the Bible and using it for prayer and discussion transformed a prison camp.

A novel by Pierre Boulle was translated into film by the British Director, David Lean, in 1957 as The Bridge Over the River Kwai. The gripping movie captivated the hearts and minds of millions. But in a section of his book that never made it to the screen, Dean Gordon recounts an act that exemplifies Jesus’ one commandment to Love one another.

At the end of a long, hot day, the contingent of British prisoners-of-war returned under armed guard from their work assignment to the compound. There, in the fading sunlight, they stood at rigid attention as the daily routine was carried out: the prisoners were accounted for one by one, and then the tools they had been issued in the morning were counted. The requisite num-ber of prisoners had returned, but the “routine” was interrupted with the discovery that a shovel was missing.

The head of the compound was summoned, and he arrived in a foul mood, demanding that the one who had taken the shovel and hidden it step forward at once. The British soldiers stood firmly at attention; no one moved. Further infuriated by this act of defiance, the Japanese commander grabbed a rifle from a nearby soldier and aimed it at the line of British prisoners of war, sweeping the weapon from side to side while screaming, “All die! All die!”

At this point, the senior British officer among the prisoners took one step forward. The enraged Japanese commander, hatred glowing in his eyes, grasped the rifle—barrel-first—in his hands and delivered a violent blow to the officer’s head with the wooden butt. The prisoner crumpled unconscious to the ground. But the rage of the commander was barely spent, and he continued to beat the supine British officer with the rifle butt until it was obvious to all the man was dead. His fury finally exhausted, the Japanese compound commander dropped the weapon and staggered away toward his headquarters, leaving the remainder of the British contingent to pick up their dead comrade and carry his body away.

Later, as the tools used by the British prisoners of war were being replaced in their stor-age area, a routine recount revealed no shovel was missing.

And Jesus said, This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends (John 15:12–13, NRSV).

Jesus laid down his life for us because he was loved into it by God. We can do it for oth-ers because we have been loved into it by Jesus.

There are a thousand ways we can lay down our lives on behalf of Jesus, but we’ll only be able to do it if we are willing to receive his love for us. We can’t earn it, only receive it and allow it to transform us. It’s only then that we, as friends of Jesus, will be able to “bear fruit” that will last.

Jesus gave his friends his own life. That was definitely a good thing. What are we pre-pared to give as friends of Jesus?
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PRAYER
Lord Jesus Christ
alive and at large in the world,
help me to follow and find you there today,
in the places where I work,
meet people,
spend money,
and make plans.
Take me as a disciple of your kingdom,
to see through your eyes,
and hear the questions you are asking,
to welcome all [people] with your trust and truth
and to change the things that contradict God’s love,
by the power of the Cross
and the freedom of your Spirit.
Amen.

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