John 13:31-38

05/02/10
John 13:31-38
Hudson UMC

With today’s reading, we find ourselves firmly in Jesus’ final discourse with His disciples. Judas has left the upper room and gone to betray Jesus to His death. Now, Jesus has just a short time before He is taken away and executed. Earlier, way back at the end of chapter three, we considered the last words of John the Baptist that are recorded in the entire Gospel of John. Here we do not have the last words of Christ because Jesus will say other things after this discourse both before He is crucified and after He is raised from the dead. However, These are His last words in the sense that He is getting ready to die and is leaving His followers with the things they need to know in order to sustain them during the days ahead, when their whole world will seem to be crashing down.

Jesus here, at the very beginning of His last major teaching, reminds the disciples of the absolutely unique connection He has with the Father. These next several sections, over chapters thirteen through seventeen, will contain some of the most amazing statements in the history of the world, connecting the man Jesus of Nazareth intimately with the God He called Father and also with another that Jesus has only alluded to previously; the Comforter, the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit. You and I live two thousand years later than these events took place. We have had centuries of church history that have attempted to unpack the reality that Jesus is explaining to His disciples here and centuries more of the church continually testing the accuracy and validity of the theological terms developed in order to articulate what Jesus is hinting at. Terms like “Of one being with the Father,” “God of God,” “Light of Light,” “Two Natures” “Hypostatic Union,” and all the rest. When we read these passages, it is easy for us to make the leap that Jesus is describing a God who is a community of Persons, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

However, we need to remember that the disciples lived on the other side of those great councils and thinkers and they would have been absolutely astounded to hear Jesus, a man, make these kinds of statements. “Now the Son of Man has been glorified and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and glorify him at once.” Jesus is saying that, when He is glorified, God is glorified. These men, who were raised as pious Jews, who knew there was only one God, must have been astounded and unable to reconcile these ideas. So it should encourage us when we realize that we have a hard time understanding the Trinity. After all, the disciples didn’t get it. It was only after hundreds of years of careful unpacking that the church was able to come to some kind of agreed terminology through which to understand what God has revealed about Himself.

“Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come. I give you a new commandment that you love one another.’” Jesus is explaining that He is about to go and die. The disciples can’t follow Him at this point because they need to stay and be the community that carries on the words of Jesus and tells the whole world about what God has done, that He has entered into even our broken and fallen condition in order to save us and empower us to live a new life now and be reunited to full fellowship with God hereafter.

Jesus says here that He is giving His disciples a new commandment, that they love one another. Now, this might seem odd to us because, if we read the Old Testament carefully, we see that God had already commanded His people to love one another. Not only that, but many people since the enlightenment of the mid eighteenth century have commented that this is not something that we needed to be told; it is self evident and we can know it if we just think for a bit. Everyone knows that we are supposed to love one another.

I might retort to that way of thinking that you don’t need to look around at the world for very long to realize that that everyone either doesn’t know this or that most people just don’t take it seriously. Wesley once published a sermon that began by saying, “It is granted, even by those who do not pay this great debt, that love is due to all humanity, that the royal law, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ carries its own evidence to all that hear it.” He continues on, saying, “All people approve of this; but does everyone practice it? Daily experience shows the contrary. Where are even the Christians who ‘love one another as God has commanded us?’” It is not a new commandment if we think that Jesus is saying words that have never been said before.

However, if we pay close attention to what Jesus is saying and how He is saying it, we realize that it is new. Jesus continues on and says, “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.” Jesus, by saying, “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another,” is not just saying that we should love each other like He has loved us. Jesus, by saying it this way, is emphasizing that our love of each other is not somehow separate from the love that He shown us. Jesus is not just the standard of our love, He is the source of it. And, if we just give it a bit more thought, brothers and sisters, we will be very glad that He is the source of our love for one another. Are you able to love all your fellow Christians with the same love that Christ has shown to you? How about the ones who keep making decisions about the church that you don’t like? How about the people who want to sing different hymns and bring different music into the church? To love all other Christians with a love that lays its life down even for those who hate them is something that is utterly beyond all of us, but Christ is our source so we, too, broken as we are, can begin to love in something of the way that we have been loved.

I want to remind you of something Jesus says here. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” These might be among the most convicting things that Jesus ever says, at least to the established church. The only thing that Jesus gives us to see whether we are really Christians or not is the love test: Do we love other Christians? For those out there who are like me, who are academically minded and who are intensely aware of their doctrinal convictions, Jesus does not say that the way people will know that we are His disciples is by our statement of faith or our good doctrine. For those of my brothers and sisters who are deeply concerned with the need to have our faith manifest itself in acts of compassion and deeds of mercy, Jesus does not say that people will know we are His disciples because of our soup kitchens or our social justice ministries. In light of our current political climate, I might also add that Jesus does not say that people will know we are His disciples because of our positions on abortion, homosexuality, and evolution, whether we are for or against them.

Now, this is not to say that all those things are not important in their own way, but none of them are what Jesus lifts up as the real mark of the disciple. I think the reason that Jesus does this is because we can have great statements of faith, fantastic doctrine, fight day and night for the poor, and be carefully discerning on a multitude of contemporary political issues and yet still not love our fellow Christians. I say fellow Christians, not fellow people, because Jesus so accurately predicts so many of our problems in the modern church.

Let me give an example. When Dave, a good friend of mine and a committed Christian, was in graduate school, he found himself in a room with two other people, a Roman Catholic and an atheist. Before long, an argument about God broke out, between the Roman Catholic and my friend Dave. Now, if there was going to be an argument about God, it seems like it should have been between one or both of the Christians and the one who claims that there is no God at all. And yet, I think that it is so illuminating. History has shown us that Christians are more likely to get into intense, sometimes bloody conflict with each other and not have a problem with those who ignore or even hate Jesus. We even see it when we show distrust to other Christian groups or have an entirely overdeveloped sense of “United Methodist Pride.” The ecumenical church is made up of all kinds of people and God loves them all. We are called to love them, too.

I think that we have a hard time loving each other as Christians because we are so bound up together. We know that, when a fringe Christian group does something that we absolutely stand against, it reflects on us. If a group of secular humanists, who hate God, does something, we can brush it off because nobody will think that it speaks for Christians. However, when our brothers and sisters do something we don’t like, we realize that they are bound to us in Christ and they, too, shape what people think about Christians. We often want to fight with our brothers and sisters because we want to set them straight so they don’t make us look bad.

Peter says to Jesus, “Lord, where are you going?” Jesus answered him, “Where I am going, you cannot follow me now; but you will follow afterward.” It is just like Peter to be this bold, isn’t it? And yet, don’t we often do the same kind of thing? If we are told something negative about us, often our first instinct is to say, “It isn’t so.” As those who have learned that Jesus is God in flesh and not just a mere man, we might be shocked at Peter’s statement. I want to say to him, “Hey, Peter. It’s Jesus, remember? Are you really going to correct Him?” And yet, Peter, in all his human boldness, in which we can see ourselves at our boldest, refuses God’s testimony about the fallenness of humanity, and asserts that he will stand, even if he has to stand alone. “Lord, why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.” “Jesus answered, ‘Will you lay down your life for me? Very truly, I tell you, before the cock crows, you will have denied me three times.”

Brothers and sisters, you and I both know how the story goes. Jesus is right, as you know. In spite of Peter’s claims, in spite of his good intentions, and even in spite of his sincerity, because I truly believe that he meant every word he said, Peter does indeed deny Jesus three times before that very night was over. We will see it play out in due course, but we know that, when humanity asserts its power and ability to do the right thing in revolt against God’s hard word that, without Him, we are helpless, what happens? Human strength turns out to be all too limited. We aren’t as good as we thought we were, as good as we wish we were. You and I, all too often, by our words or by our actions, deny Christ and exalt ourselves.

Of course we do it. After all, our culture has raised us in the great American tradition of individualism. Every man or woman for themselves, looking out for number one. Buy the latest product, read the newest self-help book, anything to get an edge over the neighbors. Keep up with the Joneses. Unless we are excelling at being consumers, spending all we can, living at the utmost extreme of our means, our world tells us that we are missing out. Our whole society is based on the idea that, if we just work hard enough, we can do anything. Peter would fit right in here in twenty-first century America, wouldn’t he?

We can look at Peter, the boldest and most dynamic of the apostles; the gifted natural leader, and we can see that, in spite of all the qualities he has that are praised by the world, they didn’t help him to stay true to Jesus. When we look at the failings of Peter, we wonder how anyone can stand strong in the face of adversity. If even the leader of the disciples couldn’t do it, what hope do we have?

The hope we have is not rooted in Peter’s success, nor is it rooted in our own success. The hope we have is that, even when we fail, God still loves us and yearns for us to be reconciled and recreated in Him. Every single Gospel tells us about Peter being warned of his denial of Christ, his boldness in spite of this warning, and his ultimate failure, crumbling even when he could see his temptation coming and could prepare for it. If we consider only this story of Peter, we would see him primarily as a tragic character, one who tries hard but always fails.

And yet, the gospels were written to people who knew who Peter was. They knew more about who Peter was than was contained in any particular Gospel. As the people heard the gospels read in the great assembly, they heard about the failings of Peter, but, as they heard it, they remembered that Peter did not remain a failure. Peter is ultimately reconciled to the resurrected Christ. Jesus accepted Peter even though Peter repeatedly and publicly rejected Christ. The people remembered that this same Peter, who could not even bear witness to Jesus to those who asked him directly that night, would be the one who would stand up in front of thousands of people on the day of Pentecost and proclaim the good news to the people for the first time. This same Peter would become so famous for the healing power of God inside of him that people would take their sick loved ones and place them on the street as he walked by because they were convinced that, if even his shadow passed over them, they would be healed. This same Peter would stand before great leaders and rulers and bear witness to Christ, enduring beatings and lashings. Finally, this same Peter, who is so faithless now, would become the Peter who, because of his relentless preaching of Jesus Christ, would endure crucifixion himself just a few decades later. It is as Jesus said, “Where I am going, you cannot follow me now; but you will follow afterward.”

So, when we see the abject failure of Peter, it should be a time of rejoicing for us. We do not rejoice in his failure, but we rejoice when we remember that the flagrant sin of Peter, even the sin of publicly denying Christ, did not keep him from the promises of the Gospel. In fact, as we will see later in John, those denials would become the strongest ties by which Peter would be bound to Christ. We rejoice because even our sin has not disqualified us from the love that God offers us in Christ Jesus. We rejoice because the same God who forgave Peter has forgiven us and wants to forgive our neighbors. We rejoice because God has not only come so close to us as to become one of us and one with us, but that, as we remember more and more as we get ever nearer to Pentecost, that God has taken up residence inside of us. We have much to rejoice over this morning. Let us go and share that joy with the world. Let us pray.

AMEN