Sunday 6th May 2007EASTER V

Fr Julian Browning

Acts  11  :  1 - 18  ; Revelation  21  :  1 – 6 ;  John  13  :  31 - 35

John 13.34  I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.

Those who live the Risen Life know how to love one another, because we have been raised from death to life, and the Christ in each of us calls to the other.

It is a new commandment. It's a new commandment for a new era, the Christian era in which we live, so it's a commandment addressed to you and me. For Jesus, it is almost his last commandment. The Gospel words we have heard come from the Last Supper, when time is short for Jesus. If anything is going to be said, it has to be said now, and Jesus chooses to say this: I give you a new commandment, that you love one another,as I have loved you. It's as if it's all that matters. Jesus doesn't say, love the world. He doesn't say, at this critical moment, love your enemies. He says, Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. This commandment is for the new little community of faith. The commandment is for all the churches, including this one. What holds the family together is not the similar beliefs we hold but the love each has for the other. That love is neither trivial, nor emotional. It is dramatic and it is persistent, because it is modelled on the love which Jesus showed to his disciples. As St.John puts it, He loved them to the end, to the uttermost, for ever.

And if wishes were horses then beggars would ride. What I mean is that this Christian love isn't the permanent feature of our lives we would like it to be, it doesn't seem to be part of the kit we were born with. I know myself and I do not love others as Jesus loves me. Maybe there's the occasional breakthrough in spite of ourselves, a rush of blood to the head, but Jesus can't mean hitting occasional highs.  Christian love is supposed to be constant in our lives, it is what marks us out from those who are not Christians. Does it? If the divine love of which Christ speaks is not real to us, then we might as well go home or put on a musical. This is Our Lord's commandment, that we love one another, as he has loved us.

It is right that this challenge should hit us in Eastertide, this strange in-between time before the coming of the Holy Spirit, when Jesus keeps appearing and disappearing in the lives of his disciples. Those post-Resurrection Gospel scenes of two thousand years ago are about a little community, like so many churches today, and a bit like us, trying to work out how to live together in a Christian way. Jesus is there, but not there. Jesus is here, yet so often not apparent to us. But what I have only recently noticed is the different tempo before and after the Resurrection. In Jesus's  ministry there is much confrontation, taking sides, highs and lows, it's all very public, he can't even keep the miracles secret from those who are amazed or from those who are jealous. But after the Resurrection, when Jesus comes among his few disciples, we hear of the peace which He brings with him into the fearful little Christian family, there is grilled fish on the beach, there is the long intimate chat on the road to Emmaus; these are the scenes in which the new commandment, to love one another as Jesus has loved us, begins to make sense. That is why we read this passage of the Gospel today. Those who live the Risen Life know how to love one another, because we have been raised from death to life, and the Christ in each of us calls to the other. What is so unexpected and wonderful, is that after his resurrection Jesus seems to have a more intimate, loving relationship with this disciples than in the old days when He walked the earth and they misunderstood everything, because they were trapped in the old ways, our ways, of taking sides, changing sides, backing away from love and intimacy even when offered by God Himself. But after the Resurrection, who knows what happened to them, but I believe it can happen to you and to me. It is as if the meaning of life, which we've been looking for for so long, is to be expressed, made plain, in life itself, our Risen life. The disciples recognise Jesus as the Lord, not through theological argument, but in the breaking of bread at breakfast on the beach. The commandment he gave, to love one another, begins to take flesh, or starts to be built like a city, in the new community of the church. It turns out that that's what you need to start a church. Those last two chapters of St.John's Gospel describe all this as St.John knew how. In a work of art, a poem, a song, a story, the little phrase, the painted patch of light on a wall, the single chord, all speak of something so much greater, a world beyond space and time, into which we are drawn. The story of the Resurrection does the same. For me, all that St.John tells us, the little phrase Peace be with you, the bread and grilled fish on the beach, Jesus asking Simon Peter three times 'do you love me?', all that speaks to us of something so much greater, of the new heaven and earth of Revelation described this morning, of the new Jerusalem, of Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, of a God who makes all things new, even the way we live and the way we love each other.