Blah blah blah blah Love

One Sunday, a preacher brought his two children to church with him, a girl and a boy. The boy slept through the entire sermon, and his sister decided that this was the perfect chance to get her brother into trouble. And so at lunch she rather primly asked him what he thought the main point of the sermon was. She had him. Or did she? It turns out the boy was prepared. He replied, “It was the same as always. Blah blah blah blah love. Blah blah blah blah love.”

He wasn’t wrong.

We do talk about love a lot in the Church. And I suppose it can sometimes sound trite and predictable, a sort of meaningless sentimentality. But is it really?

Today’s Gospel comes from what’s known as Jesus’s farewell discourse. These are the final instructions Jesus gave to his disciples on the night before his crucifixion, the last message he left them with. Those are probably words we ought to pay attention to.

Jesus said to his disciples, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love….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.”

These aren’t sentimental words for easy times. They’re hard and challenging words for difficult, frightening days.

Blah blah blah blah love? Not so much.

Think about the setting in which Jesus spoke.

Jesus and his friends had locked themselves safe behind walls in an upper room. How well they knew the danger they were in, the threats that surrounded them. How they must have jumped at every sound, feared every unknown face. Maybe Jesus himself knew the road that he was on and where it would end, but it’s pretty clear that no one else around him really understood. But surely they were all afraid of what might come.

What did Jesus do when confronted with a time of fear, peril, and uncertainty? What did he tell his followers? His friends?

He didn’t assure them that everything would be well. He couldn’t do that. Terrible days were coming, and he knew it.

But what did he do instead? What did he do on that last night?

“Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” He washed their feet. He shared a meal. And he gave them a new commandment. “Love one another,” he said.

As simple, and as difficult, as that. Love one another.

There is nothing sentimental about Jesus’s kind of love. It’s a love that’s outward-focused, self-giving. Jesus’s kind of love is perhaps the only thing that can cut through anger and fear.

“Love one another as I have loved you.”

But what does that look like?

I once read a story about a teenage boy named Samuel who had been in and out of foster homes for his whole life. (https://a.co/d/7oGkvW7).

He was angry. So angry. At his parents. At the system. At all the people who had abused and abandoned him.

He had one friend—a girl named Jenny who he’d met on the school bus. He’d never met her family, never been to her home, but she was the only person he could talk to. Their friendship gave him at least a bit of hope.

But then he was kicked out of his seventh foster placement, and he knew he’d have to move back to a shelter in a different school district, he knew he’d lose even this one friendship. He told Jenny what had happened.

A week later, he called her at home. Her father took the phone from her.

Samuel had never met Jenny’s father, but based on a lifetime of experience, he expected the man to say that he was a bad influence, to tell him to never call her again.

Instead, the girl’s father said this: “Would you like to come live with us?”

Radical, self-giving, outward-focused love changed everything for that angry teenage boy.

It cut through his anger as no lesser force could possibly have done. And it changed his life.

I don’t know whether Jenny’s father acted from a place of Christian conviction, but I do know that he followed Jesus’s pattern, Jesus’s way of love. Your own acts of love might look very different than this. But they can have equal power.

Faith in God doesn’t protect us from danger any more than it protected Jesus’s first disciples. What it does do, though, is assure us that in every way that truly matters, we are safe. It tells us that we can afford to love not counting the cost, because we ourselves are loved.

“I give you a new commandment,” Jesus says. “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” Love one another.

Love one another, no matter the cost. And there will be a cost. But still, love one another. Just as he loved us.