By the Rev Michael Burgess
Jesus says, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 15: 12).
Jesus said a great many challenging things to his followers during his earthly life, but surely this has to be the most challenging of all. How seriously do we need to take it? Is it even reasonable to command people to love each other? Command is a pretty strong word — let’s face it, Jesus didn’t say, “It is my suggestion that you love one another.” He didn’t say, “It would be nice if you were to love one another” or “I should be pleased if you were to try to love one another.” He said, “This is my commandment that you love one another.” Strong stuff, and there’s no way of getting around it!
The dictionary definition of command is “to order, require, or enjoin with authority. ” In other words, a commandment is something that absolutely must be done. Christians are ordered to love one another.
But how can anyone be commanded to love? Surely it doesn’t make sense! If love is a free response, then compulsion would kill it stone dead! Besides, we can’t control who we love or don’t love, who we like or dislike. Why, then, did Jesus give us this new and impossible commandment? What can he have meant?
In a book called “Let My People Grow”, published back in 1977, author Michael Harper writes: “We have no option but to love one another. It was the only new commandment that Jesus gave us. It is all we have to do, but how difficult it is to do it! We cannot opt for love and at the same time escape the inevitable wounds which we sustain and which we inflict on others. To love and be loved is to be vulnerable and open-ended. It means to be close enough for others to hurt us, and it is the fear of being hurt which more often than not holds us back from coming too close to others.” (page 193).
The late Father Roger Schulz, the founder and prior of the Taize Community, once said, “To have opted for love: that choice opens in people a wound from which they never recover. “
Could it be, perhaps, that we misunderstand this commandment of our Lord? Have we somehow got hold of the wrong end of the stick? Do we truly understand what the word love really means?
It seems to me that love is one of the most misused and misunderstood words in our vocabulary. All too often it has been distorted and pulled out of shape. “I love chocolate;” “I love the warm weather;” “I love the music of Edward Elgar; I love it when I don’t have to set the alarm clock.” Each of these statements is true for me— I love all these things, but would I die for any of them? I might say so metaphorically, but I certainly wouldn’t do so literally! Obviously, we use the word love in a wide variety of ways!
Naturally enough, we cannot hope to like everybody (or to expect everybody to like us, although there are any number of people who have tremendous difficulty with the idea that there may be others who aren’t very keen on them. It strikes me that such people will be for ever doomed to disappointment. A healthy recognition that you can’t win them all seems much more realistic!). Liking is very much a matter of personal taste, and I suspect that, more often than not, we might be hard put to it to spell out exactly why we like or dislike someone else. One thing’s for sure — the fact that we are Christians does not automatically mean that we shall all get on together. Far from it!
In the New Testament, the word used to describe the Christian way of loving is the Greek word agape, and it has to do with the will, and the directing of it towards another person’s good. Whether we happen to like them or not is completely immaterial. In this way, it is perfectly possible to love someone we do not like — it has to do with the way we act towards them, the way we treat them, rather than with the way we feel about them. The Gospels make it clear that Jesus didn’t always like his chosen band (there were probably even times when he disliked them fairly heartily!) but that didn’t prevent him loving them. His love for them remained constant. They received his love, and slowly began to return it. This is how it works; we love because we have first been loved.
On the cross we see God loving the unlovable, loving you and loving me, and showing in and through Jesus Christ that there are no limits to that love. He loved to the uttermost; he showed by his example how much he loved.
But Jesus didn’t just love us he told all who would follow him that if they truly wanted to be his friends they would love each other. And therefore love has always been the distinguishing sign of the Christian. An unloving Christian is a contradiction in terms. Every Christian is compelled to love.
In the musical My Fair Lady, Eliza sings a song called “Show Me”. It begins, “Words! Words! Words! I’m so sick of words… Don’t talk of love, show me!” I can’t help wondering if God sometimes feels that way about us! Words can mean everything, or they can mean nothing, and the more we back them up with action the more they are likely to mean. Was Jesus being serious when he commanded his followers to love one another? Absolutely! Let us remember that love has little to do with how we feel and everything to do with how we behave.
