6th Sunday of Easter
By Very Reverend John Arnold, Sunday 17th May, 2009
Love one another – John 15 9-17
This is my commandment, that you love one another. (John 1512a)
That’s a strange thing to say, for how can love be commanded? The clue is given a little later when Jesus says to those to whom he gives the command that they are no longer slaves but friends. That is to say, love is possible where there is freedom and freedom is possible where there is love. Only those who are free can be commanded to love; and only those who obey the command can be free.
The reason for this is the opposite of what many people think, namely that in order to be free I have to be on my own and have no ties and no responsibilities. But the fact is that I cannot be free in isolation. Actually, hermits can; but that is another and highly specialised story and, in any case, all successful hermits, like St Cuthbert, were prepared and trained and then sustained by a community. The unsupported solitary life is spiritually and psychologically very dangerous; it can lead to madness and despair. It should carry a health warning: do not try this at home! For most of us it remains true that we can only be free in community with other free persons; and that community can only be free in a wider community of communities, which ultimately cannot be smaller than the whole of humankind, indeed the whole cosmos, the unity of all things in Christ.
The achievement of a total world community of free persons is the task, which confronts humankind, never more urgently or obviously than in an age of globalisation; all worthwhile work and effort is directed towards that. That is the meaning of the life and work, the death and resurrection of Jesus. This task and this task alone sets us the goal, which we need in order to embark on that process of self-fulfilment, which alone will give us true liberty, not merely freedom from, – freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom from sin, – but freedom for – freedom for others, freedom for God. In other words, service is perfect freedom; nothing else is. That is the great paradox of which Dag Hamarskjöld wrote in his diary “At some moment I did answer ‘yes’ to someone or something – and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.”
That’s all very well for a secular saint and Secretary General of the United Nations. But can it really be true for us ordinary mortals that a life of mutual self-surrender, a life of mutual service, is life lived in freedom? Most jokes about marriage implicitly say ‘no’. You know, best man’s quips about ‘Holy Deadlock’ and so on. To say ‘yes’ to anyone or anything, let alone to someone or something, requires a measure of trust and confidence, faith in the way in which God has set up the world, which few of us start by having in ourselves.
The good news in the New Testament is that this trust and confidence are given to us as a gift by the same God who sets us the task. He not only gives us the command to love; he also gives us the freedom and the ability to do so, not in our own unaided strength but, as the old hymn puts it: ‘Strong in the strength which God supplies, Through his eternal Son.’ In the Gospels we are presented for the first time in history with a man who is genuinely and totally free – free for God and free for his fellow human beings, a man for others. He is free in this sense even when he is unfree in every other sense, in bonds at his trial and then nailed to a cross, so that he cannot even move his limbs; yet even there he is so free that he spends his time setting other people free, saying to the thief “This day you will be with me in paradise”, releasing him from the fear and bondage of sin and death, saying to Mary ‘Behold your son’ and to John ‘Behold your mother’, releasing them from the horror of the present for a life together in the future, saying ‘Father, forgive’ and releasing all of us who will accept release at his hand. The paradox here is that Jesus is absolutely free in his dealings with people but that he is at the same time absolutely constrained and not just by bonds and nails. He cannot do anything other than his Father’s will but he remains free because he has freely accepted to do that will. He voluntarily abandons the attempt and the temptation to be arbitrary, to push other people around to suit himself, in favour of total obedience. For him obedience and freedom are two sides of the same coin, two terms of one paradox.
Now there is one place in our ordinary everyday experience where we become acutely aware of the same paradox, and that is when the only thing that we can truthfully say to another person is ‘I love you’. When we are in this situation, which is called significantly ‘being in love’, we experience simultaneously total freedom and total constraint. We know that we can only be free by surrendering, we can only win the war for self-fulfilment by losing the battle for arbitrary control of our own destiny and by voluntarily giving it into someone else’s keeping. We are free to speak the truth, if ‘I love you’ is true. We are unfree if, in the circumstances, we say anything else. This has nothing to do with compromise. It is not a question of some freedom with, as a concession, some restraint. It is all and both. “The love of Christ constrains us,” wrote St Paul summing up the paradox (2 Cor 5, 14). If the Gospels show us the example of Jesus as the first free man, then the Acts and the Epistles show that spirit of freedom, which is the spirit of the Risen Christ, released and working powerfully in the lives of others and in human history. To be met by the Risen Christ and to be inspired by his Spirit is to meet God, neighbour and self and to meet them as loveable.
Without the spirit of Jesus I cannot love God, for I simply cannot believe, given the state of the world, that He is a loving Father; without the spirit of Jesus I cannot love my neighbour, even the person closest to me, my wife or husband, my child or grandchild, because that person is over against me, making demands, being a nuisance, curtailing my freedom; without the spirit of Jesus I cannot even love myself because I am alienated, estranged from myself, just like my neighbour only even more inescapable. But when I meet my God, my neighbour and myself in the Risen Lord then we are all on the same side and I am enabled to fulfil the law, which unfulfilled is a curse, ‘to love God and my neighbour as myself.’ I am free to obey the command to love, as he loves us. We can fulfil this command, if we let him fulfil it in us. That is not only the Law and the Prophets; it is the Gospel of Christ.
There is a legend that John, the Beloved Disciple, to whom we owe the transmission of Jesus’ command to love, took the Blessed Virgin Mary with him to Ephesus and that after her death, or dormition, he would wander about in the early Christian community there, saying, as he had said in his Epistles, ‘Little children, love one another.’ When he was very old, the only survivor of those who had actually known Jesus on earth, the leaders of the church at long last persuaded him to preach the Gospel to them; and everyone came to hear what new disclosures about the life of Jesus, what new truths, what new wisdom he would bring. He stood up and said, ‘Little children, love one another,’ and sat down again. That is all he said and all that needs to be said. Amen.
John Arnold
