My mother was a note taker. Going through her apartment shortly after her death, my sister Heather, brother Kevin and I found notebooks filled with recipes, quotations, notes on medical matters, and an assortment of other topics. Among these notes was one dated January 20, 2021. Given what she had written on the surrounding pages, Mom seemed to be thinking about the violence of January 6th and the deep political division in our country. In that context she wrote: “God is the Good that lives in the Souls of all mankind, and who, if we will allow it, can work in all of us though love, kindness and compassion to make this world a place of peace and unity for everyone.”
Mom of course believed that God is more than an abstract concept; witness her use of the personal pronoun “who” in referring to God. Just as the author of 1 John describes God’s character by saying, “God is love,” I think Mom was suggesting that the character of God is goodness. And much as the Gospel of John declares that Christ the Word of God is the light that enlightens all people, Mom was suggesting that God is near to us, seeking to enlighten us, to transform us, because God, being Goodness itself, desires for us to do what is good—to love one another, to accept one another, to care for one another, to forgive one another, to seek to understand one another, in short, to live in community with one another.
When I stumbled upon Mom’s words earlier this week, I immediately saw a connection to this morning’s scriptures in which Jesus calls his followers to lives of love and service. In this week’s chapter of The Message of Jesus, Adam Hamilton looks at Jesus’ last words: the things he said during the events of Holy Week, the words of instruction he gave in the days leading up to his crucifixion. I’ve chosen to focus on the three commandments Jesus gave at the Last Supper: love one another, serve one another, and remember me.
In John’s presentation of the Last Supper, Jesus instructs his disciples to “love one another, not once, but three times. In our reading, he gives the disciples a “new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, so you also must love each other.” Two chapters later, in 15.12-13, Jesus repeats the commandment: “Love each other just as I have loved you.” And then, a few verses later, he offers a summary of the reason for all his teaching: “I give you these commandments so that you can love each other.”
The command to love others is of course not new. It goes back thousands of years to the Hebrew scriptures which formed foundation of the Jewish tradition which Jesus and his first disciples shared. Perhaps we should understand Jesus’ use of the word “new,” as pointing to his intention to re-new the emphasis on the commandment to love. Jesus is placing love at the center of obedience and faithfulness to God. Thus, it is no surprise to find some form of “the call to love, to practice agape, … in all four Gospels and all of the New Testament epistles.”
Hamilton argues, “It cannot be overstated that the central ethic of Jesus, powerfully captured in his own death on the cross, is the call to love. If you don’t get this, you’ve missed the message of Christ altogether.” Or, as the late UCC affiliated pastor William Sloane Coffin put it, summarizing Paul’s famous “love chapter” of 1 Corinthians 13: “If we fail in love, we fail in everything.”
Love is to be the defining, identifying mark of Christ’s followers. At the table, mere hours before his arrest and crucifixion, Jesus tells his disciples, “This is how everyone will know that you are my disciples, when you love each other.” The credibility of Christianity rests in love. The early North African church Father Tertullian tells us that pagans observing the mutual care of Christians for one another were sometimes moved exclaimed, “Look how they love one another!”
In Luke’s telling of the Last Supper, Jesus gives a closely related commandment: serve one another. This comes in the context of the disciples arguing over who among them was the greatest. Even as Jesus spoke of his impending death, even as he shared a final meal with them, the disciples still don’t get it, they don’t understand the nature of the Kingdom “he was ushering in.” And so a confused discussion of Jesus’ prediction that one of them would betray him, turns into a boasting match about who is spiritually superior. Jesus, perhaps with a bit of exasperation, tells them, “The kings of the Gentiles rule over their subjects, and those in authority over them are called ‘friends of the people.’ 26 But that’s not the way it will be with you. Instead, the greatest among you must become like a person of lower status and the leader like a servant.”
Jesus himself sets the example of leadership through humble service as he serves the meal. Sharon Ringe observes, “Jesus’ own serving of the meal provides the standard for leadership in the community….By serving or distributing the food to the other guests, Jesus has taken on the work generally carried out by a servant or by a woman of the household. Far from a role marked by prestige…Jesus’ role at the supper belongs to those who lack status or who relinquish it in order to serve others.” In our reading from John, Jesus demonstrates this same attitude of humble service through the act of washing the disciples’ feet, once again a task reserved for a servant, usually the lowest ranking servant.
Hamilton points out that in Matthew and Mark, this call to humble service takes place in a different context. After James and John ask that Jesus grant them special places of authority in his kingdom, the other disciples hear of the request and become angry. Jesus tells them they are not to be like the world but instead they are to imitate him: “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. 43But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, 44and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. 45For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”
Thus, in both word and deed, Jesus declares that true greatness is found in service. As Justo González observes, this means that “true loyalty to this strange Lord of ours, who is among us as one who serves, lies precisely in serving as himself serves.”
Service is love in action; it is seeking the good of others in concrete ways. Service is what love looks like when it is embodied. And even though the commandments given at the Last Supper address relationships among believers, the scope of our love and service is to be much broader. Recall the commandment to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. When a lawyer asks Jesus to explain exactly who his neighbor is, that is to say, tell me exactly who I have to love and who I don’t, Jesus responds with the parable of the Good Samaritan. St. Augustine says that one of the great lessons of this parable is that our neighbor is whoever happens to be near us at any given moment, whoever needs help, regardless of their class, race, ethnicity, gender, or any other difference. Thus our love can never be parochial. It must be expansive; it must extended beyond the walls of the church to embrace the world so loved by God. Julian, the last of the pagan Roman emperors, observed that the recent growth of Christianity was caused in part by what he described as Christians’ “benevolence toward strangers and care for the graves of the dead” and he later lamented that “ support not only their poor, but ours as well.”
This call to love and service is directly connected to the call to remember Jesus. You see, we not only remember Jesus—his life, his teachings, his deeds, his death and his resurrection—when we come to the Communion Table to celebrate the Lord’s Supper. We also remember Jesus when we obey his commandments, when we imitate his deeds, when we seek to live with even a modicum of the self-giving love and compassionate service that he displayed. Indeed, we metaphorically re-member Jesus: in our works of love and deeds of service we become the Body of Christ at work in the world; we, the people of God, become, in Teresa of Avila’s words, the eyes through which Christ’s compassion looks out on a hurting world, the feet by which Christ goes about doing good, and the hands by which Christ embraces, welcomes, and blesses the people of the world he so deeply loves.
On the night before he was crucified, our Lord Jesus commanded his disciples to love others, to serve them and to remember him. So, let us seek to be faithful; let us seek to demonstrate to the world that we are Christ’s disciples. Let us open our hearts and souls to God, so that the Holy Spirit might enter in to transform us and empower us to live lives of love, kindness and compassion, lives which embody for the world the mutual care and concern which Jesus taught and the Beloved Community which God desires.
