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May 9, 2004; The Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year C
    The Rev. Harold "Skip" Comer, Rector

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” [i]

The word love, and its variants: loves and loved, are used fifty-three times in the Gospel of John, almost twice as much as the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke combined.  John first used the word in his famous verse, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but may have eternal life,”[ii] to introduce the world to why God acted in his son.  It was out of love for what he had created.  But what type of love was it?

I believe that most of us would acknowledge that there are different types of love.  C. S. Lewis in his “Four Loves”[iii] can help us to understand the word love.    Derived from Greek words the four kinds of love are: stórge or affection; philia or friendship; eros; and agape, charity or selfless love. 

Stórge or affection is love of something or someone.  I love fishing.  Some of you love golf.  It is an affection or appreciation for something, like the beautiful blossoms on the cherry trees outside the windows behind the altar.  This form of love can also be expressed toward others, as the word describes, affection is to have a fondness for or a desire to develop a relationship with someone else.  As human beings we need the affection of others, and we also have the need to express our affection to others.  Affection is both a need to be loved and a gift that we have to share with others.

Philia is the next level of love and is often identified with the words friendship or brotherly love.  It is a deeper love toward someone who shares common interest and who we desire to be around.  Eros is romantic love, that mysterious desire that we have toward someone else, wanting to be with them, and express our affection to them.  While there is a sexual attraction, eros is more than just sex.

Agape is selfless love because it wants nothing in return.  It is described as divine love because its source is God.   It is given freely as a gift and while it desires a response, this love is not dependent upon a positive response like the other three types of love. 

This type of love is more than just an ethic and it is something that cannot be commanded, because to do so would invalidate it as a gift.  It is a force or power that is poured down upon us.  It is up to us to decide whether we want to be embraced by it or not.  The closest that we come to this type of love on a human level is the love a parent has for their child or children.

Let me tell you a story about how I first experienced this type of love, it is a story that I told you about six years ago.  When I was seven years old, my father walked out on us one day and we never saw him again.  About a year after my father left, we started attending the Baptist Church up the street from where we lived.  The congregation was very accepting of us.  Now this was a bit unusual, even though I did not know it at the time.  You see, Baptist have very strong views against divorce, and by this time my mother had filed for a divorce from my father.

Even though I felt like an odd ball because I was the only boy in the congregation that did not have a father, it was not because of anything the Baptist did.  As a matter in fact adults and children befriended us.  I am not sure if they knew the whole story about my dad or not, but they were not judgmental toward us one bit.  I can still see the faces of the men in the congregation who reached out and spent time with me, and helped to provide a healthy male role model for me to follow.

Jesus told his disciples, "I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.   By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."[iv]

Now this commandment is not really new.  From the time of Moses, the Jews had been told to love one another,[v] and Jesus himself had repeated this message in his preaching earlier in his ministry.  What is new, is Jesus saying, "as I have loved you," and "By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."[vi]

The unmistakable proof of discipleship, to being a follower of Jesus Christ, is loving.  One might argue, well what about - faith in Christ, loyalty to him and his Church, to following our Lord's teachings.  Aren't these the proof of discipleship?

I turn to that wonderful passage in Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, where Paul talks about the way of love.   Remember, it goes like this, "If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. ...[vii]  Even though this is a popular reading at weddings, and rightly so, so as to remind the two being united together in Holy Matrimony about healthy love, Paul was not writing about the romantic love that two people find together.

Paul makes these claims about love because of his understanding of what Christianity is and what it is not.   Christianity is not about some thing, like a shrine, or a set of moral do's and don'ts, it is about some one.  It is about God who reveals himself in the person of Jesus Christ.   Christianity is about a relationship, a loving relationship between God through Jesus Christ and us.  Paul wrote his letter to the church in Corinth to help them understand that the way to manifest Christ in the church and to the community outside is to live and express this love.  This love is a gift or fruit of the Holy Spirit, as he reminds us in his letter to the Galatians.[viii]

Paul, in saying that love is the trademark of a Christian community is not denying the need for faith, loyalty and a striving to do what is just in the eyes of God.  I believe that Paul's understanding of love encapsulates these ingredients and more.

And Jesus was not trying to ignore the faith that the disciples would need as he departed from them.  Yet he knew that within love there is faithfulness, loyalty and obedience to the one that is loved.

If we were to scan the four gospels, we would find that it is difficult to read a chapter without God's or Christ's love being revealed either through his teachings or his actions.  Sometimes the love is tough, as in the story of the rich man who would not give up his money so that he could enter the Kingdom.  Yet there is an overriding message revealed in the Gospels, and that message is love.  It is not just the preaching of love, but the acting out of that love by Jesus - to his disciples, the poor and the outcast, the sinners, and to anyone who would receive him.

Richard Hays wrote in the Christian Century a several years ago, "The charge to the church is momentous: the credibility of the gospel is contingent upon our sacrificial love for one another.  If outsiders do not see in the Christian community (this kind of) love, there is no reason for them to attend to the message that God loved the world so much that he sent his Son to rescue it.  The visible truth of the gospel hangs upon our visible counterculture of love."[ix]

Will those that we meet know that we are disciples of Jesus Christ?

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