Past Sermon

Sermon Title: "I'm Supposed to Love Whom?"
Date: May 6, 2007
Minister: Rev. Charles E. Ensley, Jr.

Lesson:  John 13:31-35

“When he had gone out…” today’s lesson begins.  When who had gone out?  Judas.  In the verses immediately preceding today’s passage, Judas is with the other disciples in the Upper Room as Jesus shared his last meal on Earth with them, the meal we commemorate each time we receive communion.  Jesus sensed what Judas was about to do, and told him, “Do quickly what you are going to do.” (13:27)  In the verse just before Judy read today, I find it jarringly ironic that John writes, “So, after receiving the bread, [Judas] immediately went out.”  (13:30)

Receiving the bread, which Christians regard as one of the highest sacraments.  Judas took communion at the Last Supper, then went out to betray Jesus.  It would be like us saying, “I don’t believe this hocus-pocus about Jesus at all.  But I’ll eat the bread because I didn’t have time for breakfast today and it’s going to be another half hour till I get a donut.”

So there Jesus is, left at the table with the eleven remaining disciples.  It was night, the final night of his life.  This was his last opportunity to sum up his three year ministry and make his farewell to his followers.  That’s why these chapters of John’s Gospel are called the “Farewell Discourses.”  Jesus looks around at the lot, most presuming Judas had left because he was the treasurer and had some financial dealings to handle . . . which he did.  Jesus looks at them, tells them he will only be with them a little longer, and they cannot come with him.  Then he says to them:  “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.” (13:34-35)  This very commandment, or mandate, is what defines the name for Maundy Thursday when we observe the Last Supper.  Maundy is from the Latin mandatum, or commandment. 

When is Jesus saying this?  Right after one of the twelve has gone from the room to betray him.  Perhaps John intends his readers to think of Judas’ betrayal of Jesus as a key turning point in Jesus’ path to glorification.  Such an interpretation would fit the overall thrust of John’s Gospel:  If the commandment of Jesus to his closest friends is to love one another, has not Judas broken Jesus’ greatest commandment?

Although in other places Jesus talked about loving neighbors and even loving enemies, in speaking to his disciples that night he is saying that acting compassionately toward fellow believers is the way that people outside the church will know that they are his disciples.  If Jesus were to say this today, he might say to them, ‘Look, guys, one of you has just left to betray me.  The rest of you are going to have to stick together and get along if this whole Christianity thing is ever going to succeed.’

So here we are, twenty centuries later, getting ready as a congregation to “sit around the table.”  You look around.  There are some people you know, and some you don’t know.  Some you’ve sat on church commissions with and were really impressed with what they said and did.  Others you may have been glad to see leave the commission, or at least you were glad your term was up so you could leave the commission.  Some you see eye-to-eye with on matters of faith, or politics, or child-rearing.  Others couldn’t be farther from you in their political leanings or opinions on current social mores or hot-button issues.

And Jesus says to the disciples they are to love one another.  He wasn’t talking outside the walls of the Upper Room.  He meant inside the walls, those sitting at the table with him . . . you, right here.  And you’re thinking, I’m supposed to love whom?

At a clergy luncheon last month, a minister serving a church for the past two years as interim told us that her congregation was now ready to put together a search committee for a new minister.  “And you’ve been there two years?” I asked, incredulously.  “What have they been doing?”  She said their differences were so great that they had to learn to love one another first.  “There’s 40 people worshipping in a church that holds 400,” she said.  “You come in the door and one person is sitting there, and two other there, and maybe three together up near the front.  What does that say if you’re a visitor coming in and looking around?”

Jesus urged his disciples to have love for one another so that “everyone will know that you are my disciples.”  The ability to love all—even the most unlovable of sorts, has always been the test of this discipleship-love.  After the crowds had stoned him, mocked him, spit upon him, screamed “crucify him,” Jesus could still cry out in love, “Forgive them, they know not what they do.”  How can we hope to imitate this love in our own lives, both inside and outside our church?  How can we prove ourselves disciples of this love?

There is a true story of a retired Presbyterian pastor, coming back to church one Sunday after the death of his wife.  “He came to the early service to change the pattern he and Nancy had established of attending at 11.  He thought there’d be people there he knew, to sit with, but he misjudged and came 15 minutes early, the way preachers will.  He sat alone in the center of a pew, two empty pews behind him and three in front, a brave, sad, solitary man.”

But then the miracle happened.  “Bob and Nita Garrett slide out of their pew, six rows behind, and quietly moved down the aisle to slip in beside him.  Two Presbyterians had left their pew to move down closer to the front.”  (Houston Hodges, on Ecunet Bulletin Board)

I have seen similar things happen here.  I don’t want to imply that you haven’t been very loving as a congregation, but there have been times when any of us, including myself, have perhaps avoided, or steered clear, of someone who just isn’t “our” kind of person.  Maybe I just didn’t have time to deal with their issues that day. 

I simply challenge you to focus on the “in-house” message Jesus offered his disciples in today’s lesson.  You may not have to like everybody; just love them!

I’m supposed to love whom?  Yes, even them.