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John 15: 9–17
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May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be
acceptable in thy sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
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This morning, I suspect we have more in common with the congregation
for whom John wrote his Gospel than we know. For just as we are
struggling to worship God in this time of pandemic, when nothing yet
is entirely back to normal and we are still cautious about gathering
together, still cautious about singing or taking Communion together, so
they were having trouble following Jesus’ commands when
nothing – absolutely nothing — had gone the way they thought
it would.
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You see, the Gospel of John was written well after the synoptic Gospels
of Matthew, Mark and Luke. By the end of the first century in the
community for whom John wrote, Jesus was only a memory — and a
distant memory at that. Most of the people in that congregation
had never met him. And nearly all of his disciples had
died. When the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the occupying
Roman legions in 76 AD, many believers took that as a sure sign that
the end times had begun and Jesus would soon come back for
them. . . in power and great glory. But
the end times had not come. . . and Jesus
hadn’t come back either. Instead, life just went
on – and in some ways that was the hardest part of all, especially
because these early Christians now had both Roman and Jewish authorities
to contend with. This little congregation felt fragile and
insecure. They very much wanted to hear once again from their Lord.
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In response, John pulled together many of the things Jesus had said on
that last night he had spent with his disciples in the Upper Room, and
he put them into one extended discourse towards the end of his
Gospel. We heard part of this discourse in last week’s Gospel
passage, and we are hearing more of it this morning. We have come
to call this collection of sayings The Farewell Discourse, and it is a
bit like The Last Lecture Series in some colleges, where professors are
asked what they would say in a lecture if they knew it was their last
chance to speak.
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What Jesus tells his disciples that evening is that he is going away, but
he adds quickly that he will not leave them orphaned. For, you
see, he knows that things will be challenging for them in days to
come. He knows he’s asking a lot when he calls on them to
love one another – at a time when they want comfort and
reassurance themselves. So he tells them he will ask the Father
to send them a different Advocate, whom he calls the Spirit of
Truth. It’s in the strength of that Spirit, he tells them,
that they will be able to love one another as he has loved them.
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That little detail – that they are to love one another as he
has loved them is really the crux of this passage. So this
morning it is worth looking at how he does love them. The
Gospel tells us that Jesus loves them to the end. That means he
does not falter or turn away from them. And, of course, what he
does for them he does for us too.
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In other words, he stays, he stays put — with us and for
us — to the very end. And when you think back to the events
of that Maundy Thursday evening, you know it is true. That is
exactly what he did. After that last supper with them and that
long final conversation, he accompanies them across the Kidron Valley
to the Garden of Gethsemane. And there, knowing what is about to
happen, he prays. When the soldiers arrive to arrest him, the
disciples scatter. They run away. But Jesus does not abandon
them. Nor does he forget them. Even on the cross he is
instructing the disciple he loved to take Mary, his mother, into the
disciple’s own family. And he is telling his mother to
adopt that disciple as a son. He loved them, you see, he provided
for them to the end.
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I think what that means for us is that we, too, are to stay put,
trusting in the Lord. In these uncertain times when we too are
feeling fragile and uncertain, we are to stay with the people God has
given us to love. We are to nurture and be nurtured by those
people. We are to challenge them and be challenged by
them – not in our own strength, but in the strength of the Spirit
who teaches us how to love one another. “The Spirit will
keep us connected in love,” Jesus told them: “You
to me. . . all of us to God the
Father. . . and you, each one to
another.” You see, no matter how uncertain our times are, by
the strength of the Holy Spirit, those connections will be strong.
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Barbara Lundblad, who is a Lutheran pastor, tells a funny story about
the connections that bind us together in tough times. She says,
The reason mountain climbers are tied together is to keep the sane ones
from going home. Whoever said that was playing with us a bit, for
we know mountain climbers are tied together to keep from getting lost
or going over a cliff. But there’s another piece of truth
here. When things get tough up on the mountain, when fear sets
in, many a climber is tempted to say, “This is crazy!
I’m going home.“ The life of faith can be like
that – doubts set in, despair overwhelms us, and the whole notion
of believing in God seems crazy. Jesus knew his disciples would
have days like that. So he told them, “We’re tied
together like branches on the vine – or like climbers tied to
the rope – tied together by the Spirit of God, to trust in the
One who is always more than we can understand, who will keep us moving
ahead on the journey of faith, who can encourage us when believing
seems absurd. I will not leave you orphaned,” Jesus
said. “I am coming to you.”
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And that is what he does. That is what we can expect. We
can expect the Lord to come to us — just as he came to Mary when
she searched for him in the tomb, just as he caught up with the two
disciples on the road to Emmaus, just as he found his disciples in
Galilee where they had gone fishing and invited them to
breakfast. Where any two or three of us are gathered in his
name, He has promised to be among us – calming our fears,
reminding us of his love and asking us to do the same for the ones we
live with. For that is what his name – Immanuel –
means. It means ‘God is with us.’ It means that
we are not alone.
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Thanks be to God.
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Amen.
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