Sermon preached at St Paul’s Athens and on Zoom for the 6th Sunday of Easter: : Acts 10, 44-end; John 15

Fr Leonard Doolan

 

In a previous sermon we reflected on Jesus the True Vine, and we ‘rested’ a little on the meaning of the word ‘abide’ and what it means to make our ‘home’ in Christ the True Vine.

The gospel this morning continues on from this image and we hear of ‘abiding together in love.’ This love between us as dwellers in the life of the True Vine, is likened to the love that Jesus abides in with the Father who sent him, and, by extension, we live in that shared love.

The message couldn’t be clearer from our Lord. ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you’. These words are reminiscent of what Jesus says to his disciples when they gather for the meal before his arrest and crucifixion.

Love is centre-stage in the message of Jesus. He conjoins his message about love with keeping his commandments. This is worth a few moments of reflection. What might those commandments be?

Our minds will automatically be led to the 10 Commandments given to Moses on the mountain of Sinai, those commandments that are at the heart of Jewish and Christian ethical practice, and indeed lie at the heart of the ethics of most developed countries throughout the world.

Elsewhere in the gospels Jesus refers to these well-known commandments, but when asked by a Scribe which is the first commandment, it is not a recitation of the 10 Commandments, the Decalogue, that Jesus offers him. ‘Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You will love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these’. (Mark 12, 29ff)

This is known as the Shema from the Hebrew word for ‘hear’ or ‘listen to’.  In Mark’s version of these words the Scribe immediately says, ‘you’re right’, but in St. Luke’s version the Scribe goes on to ask ‘Who is my neighbour?’ setting up the occasion for one of the best known of all the parables of Jesus, the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

By telling of the response of the Samaritan, Jesus is offering an exegesis – and interpretation from the Old Testament text of the Shema. It is a parable of ‘love in action’.

It is to this nuanced character of love that Our Lord encourages us to inhabit – to abide in his love. It is love of God and love of neighbour that lie at the core of the Christian life.

As a scriptural theme, perhaps the best song about love is to be found in the correspondence between St. Paul and the squabbling early Christian community in Corinth. Taken from the first of his letters to them, his paean of praise for love is used in so many church contexts.

‘If I speak in the tongues of mortals and angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clashing cymbal’ (1 Cor 13, 1). I’m sure the rest of this well known text immediately comes to mind. ‘Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude…’ 1 Cor 13 4)  – words from a text that has decorated so many marriage ceremonies for countless decades. ‘And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love’. (1 Cor 13, 13)

We could so easily set as parallel texts, side by side reading, the Ten Commandments, and the praise of love by St. Paul; the set of rules with divine love breathed into them; the divine love to be discovered in love-filled keeping of the Commandments. Jesus bids us to abide in his love and to abide in his commandments – the highest of which is that we love God and one another.

George Herbert was ordained an Anglican priest in the year 1630 having studied theology at Trinity College Cambridge, where in 1620 he had also been appointed as Public Orator of Cambridge University – a position of great honour. Herbert was also a poet, and one of his best known and best loved poems,  is addressed to Love.

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, Guiltie of dust and sinne, But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning, If I lack’d any thing.

A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here: Love said, You shall be he. I the unkinde, ungratefull?  Ah my deare,  I cannot look on thee. Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them:  let my shame Go where it doth deserve. And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame? My deare, then I will serve. You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: So I did sit and eat.

Herbert so perceptively understands the divine love, and presents the gracious invitation to us of that divine love – we are bidden to sit at the table and to dine generously at God’s banquet, whose main fare is the divine love revealed in Christ.

Christ calls us – he calls us to sit with him, to abide with him, to make our home in him. The domestic arrangements are furnished with keeping faithful to the divine teaching, and inhabiting the divine love, the love that is for God and for our neighbour. Remember that greatest commandment ‘Hear O Israel… love the Lord your God… love your neighbour as yourself.

Love must be our departure point as we seek to travel to know God better, and also our point of arrival, if we are to live in him as he lives in his Son, Jesus Christ.

Set into the floor of the chapel of the Royal Foundation of St. Katharine in the East End of London there is a round tablet with words from St. Augustine of Hippo, ‘We do not come to God by navigation, but by love’. These words of St. Augustine resonate with words of Christ, of St. Paul, and of George Herbert. Love is the very heart of everything Christian – even sacrificial love.

‘And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.’