“His Commandments Are Not Burdensome”
1 John 5:01; John 15:9-17
Easter 6
Psalm 98:1-31 O sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvelous things. His right hand and his holy arm have gotten him victory.
2 The Lord has made known his victory; he has revealed his vindication in the sight of the nations.
3 He has remembered his steadfast love and faithfulness to the house of Israel. All the ends of the earth have seen the victory of our God.
John 15:9-17 [Jesus said,] 9“As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. 10If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. 11I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. 12 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14You are my friends if you do what I command you. 15I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. 16You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. 17I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.” 1 John 5:1-65:1 Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the parent loves the child. 2By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. 3For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome, 4for whatever is born of God conquers the world. And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith. 5Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? 6This is the one who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the one that testifies, for the Spirit is the truth.
The Sermon
At the beginning of the passage describing Jesus at the Last Supper, John writes, “Having loved his disciples who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”
I like to think that by the time his hour had come, Jesus had a certain fondness for the disciples he had called together, who had walked away from everything to follow him, who had put on display for him their wonder, their awe, their faith, and occasionally their bumbling and their lack of faith.
But Jesus loved them every step of the way.
A few years ago, Bill Bryson wrote in a column,
“This may get a little sentimental, and I’m sorry, but yesterday evening I was working at my desk when my youngest child came up to me […] and asked me if I felt like playing a little ball with him. I was trying to get some important work done before going away on a long trip, and I very nearly declined with regrets, but then it occurred to me that never again would he be seven years, one month, and six days old, so we had better catch these moments while we can.
“So we went out onto the front lawn and here is where it gets sentimental. There was a kind of beauty about the experience so elemental and wonderful I cannot tell you—the way the evening sun fell across the lawn, the earnest eagerness of his young stance, the fact that we were doing this most quintessentially dad-and-son thing, the supreme contentment of just being together—and I couldn’t believe it would ever have occurred to me that finishing an article or writing a book or doing anything at all could be more important and rewarding than this.
“Now what has brought on all this sudden sensitivity is that a week or so ago we took our eldest son off to [college]. He was the first of our four to fly the coop, and now he is gone—grown up, independent, far away—and I am suddenly realizing how quickly they go.”
A neighbor then told Bryson that, once they leave, they never really come back.
And Bryson says, “This isn’t what I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear that they come back a lot, only this time they hang up their clothes, admire you for your intelligence and wit, and no longer have a hankering to sink diamond studs into various odd holes in their heads. But the neighbor was right. He is gone. There is an emptiness in the house that proves it.” [1]
I like to think that in the midst all the towering declarations and final instructions, Jesus also maybe had a little bit of a sentimental streak for the disciples, not entirely unlike the way parents get sentimental over their children when they go off on their own for the first time.
They had gathered for supper as the sun was going down, which is a time of day that will be familiar to readers of John’s gospel, whose fifth sentence is, “A light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”
The light shines—present tense, meaning the Son of God was and still is—and the darkness did not overcome it—past tense, meaning, the darkness may have tried while it thought it had the chance, but it did not succeed.
This is what separates Christian thought from all the other Jesus fans.
Jesus fans are many, and they all deserve our blessing; as Jesus says in Mark’s gospel, “Whoever is not against us is for us” (Mark 9:40).
Jesus fans can go as far as saying: great guy; obvious role model for Gandhi—that’s a good thing; marvelous teacher of daily goodness and eternal truths. “If we all lived by what he said and did, we’d sure have a lot easier time negotiating the darkness.”
But Christian thought goes a step further than Jesus fandom, and says: that whole Jesus thing was not all just a random, historical event. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
It was by night that Nicodemus, a leader of the Pharisees, came to Jesus, in the dark, and said, “Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God, because no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” And it was in his late night conversation with Nicodemus that Jesus said, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
When he went to raise Lazarus from the dead, Jesus said words to the effect, if you walk in the light, you can make it all right; but those who only walk in darkness stumble around because there is no light in them.
And now, just a moment ago, as the disciples were still sitting around the room where they had eaten the last supper, Judas Iscariot left the room when Jesus said, “Do quickly what you are going to do.” And John goes out of his way to say, “After receiving the piece of bread, Judas immediately went out—and it was night.”
The followers of God are used to things needing to happen sometimes when the sun isn’t shining. They’re used to learning things about God and life and holiness, and being given instructions that they had never before imagined being able to carry out, not when it’s easy, in the bright light of day, but when it’s dark, and things aren’t so clear, or certain, or visible.
The secular way to say it is, “The darkest hour is just before dawn”—in other words, morning will eventually come anyway, assuming you make it through the hard part.
The Christian way to say it is: “A light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”
“This is my commandment,” Jesus said that night, “that you love one another as I have loved you.”
That was just after the last supper, after he had washed their feet, at the beginning of a long discourse to the disciples that must have run late, late into the night, the last teaching they would hear from him before he went to the cross.
Over and over in this last, final lecture, as late evening turns to dark night, the word “love” springs up, over and over again, like midnight blooms, the flowers that only bloom at night.
As he spoke those words of love, they became like a field of midnight blooms that blanketed the disciples in the absolute certainty that God loves this world dearly; that Jesus is the full expression of God’s love for all God’s creation, including you and me; and that he, Jesus, has come to love them as friends—“I don’t call you servants any longer, because the servant doesn’t know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends,” he says.
They are to love one another as he has loved them; and if they love him, they are to keep his commandments. And his greatest and last commandment to them is: love one another.
“No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you.”
“Love one another, just as I have loved you.”
And the story continued, to the cross, and then the empty tomb, and then the disciples gifted with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and sent out to found churches and make disciples of all nations.
And then, a couple of funny things happened: time, and life.
When you look around at some of the disaster zones that some churches have become—members who don’t trust each other; World War III threatening to break out over what color to paint the parlor; worshipers so busy thinking about how much better it used to be that mentally they’re not really “there” for the hymns, or the preaching, or the prayers—when you see and hear the horror stories of how some church here or there has, for all practical purposes, ceased to be a place of spiritual nourishment or anything remotely resembling the fellowship of the people of God,
it may be strangely comforting to realize that this kind of thing has been happening for a long, long time. It started happening within the very first generation of the Church. The New Testament letters—that’s what most of those New Testament books are: letters between church leaders and churches—full of incidents of distrust and anger and humiliation and irritation; factions and break-ups and accusations all over the place.
And the people of God found that there could be a lot of reasons to find it hard to forgive someone, to deal with someone, to like someone, even in this sacred community.
There are the “everyday” forgivenesses that severely test our willingness to let it slide, or to extend an exoneration—the road rage incidents; the boss who acts like a jerks “because he can”; the cashier who acts like you have bitterly insulted her by bothering her with an actual task.
In a good mood, if you’re strong enough to summon it up, you can go, “Ah, forget it. They’re having a really bad day, and what’s it to me anyway?”
But of course there are the forgivenesses that seem almost beyond the human ability to summon. Terrible things are sometimes done between people; some cruelties are amazing and some kinds of apathy are just inexcusable, and it’s agonizing, and frustrating, and sometimes you kind of allow yourself to think—wrongly—that maybe there are some things that are beyond the realm of God’s forgiveness and certainly, it would seem, beyond ours.
It can be, in a word, difficult to forgive.
It can also be tremendously challenging to tolerate some people; to accept some; to understand some. It can scale the heights of near impossibility to put up with some people’s childishness, to endure someone’s, shall we politely say, “quirky idiosyncrasies.”
Every one of us has our pet peeves, and I suspect that if you and I had to do it, in an hour of deepest soul searching and having to lay it all on the line, I’ll bet we each have our private lists, names of people we have known or have read about whose injustices or arrogance or profound ignorance have caused emotional or psychic and perhaps other kinds of wounds that simply will not heal.
All of this is very difficult. It may take more than a lifetime of work to try to come to terms with it.
But I submit to you, with the author of the First Letter of John: it’s not that hard to love.
They say it can be really hard to love sometimes.
But it is time for our generations—spoiled by excess, jaded by too much experience with falsehoods and cheap violence for entertainment purposes, fooled into dismissing every act of sensitivity as “political correctness”—to remember how, or to learn, to love.
There is no reason on God’s earth why it should be so hard to love. It is not hard to love.
It’s hard to forgive and accept and tolerate and negotiate and confront. Those can all be hard to the point of seeming impossibility.
But it is not as hard as they say it is to love.
For one like me, who has never faced down an attack dog; who hasn’t since World War II had a known relative rounded up and sent to a concentration camp—though God knows what evils my unknown Yugoslav relatives may have endured or committed during the early 90s; who has only rarely known immediate fear of a clear and present evil;
for someone like me, it would be, as the English say, “churlish” to pretend that I know what it’s like to come up with the strength to love as, say, Martin Luther King taught, to make the enormous sacrifice of setting aside ego and personal sense of injustice perpetrated against me and to declare boldly that no matter how much bitter, violent, ignorant hatred is spewed at me, I will counter it all with unyielding love.
But that is the task. If anything, I should be able to say, if people like MLK and Gandhi and countless others could somehow come up with the gumption to do it in their circumstances, all the more reason for me to say in mine, and you to say in yours:
The love of God is this: that we obey his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome. “Love one another, just as I have loved you.”
Having loved his disciples who were in the world, Jesus loved them to the end.
By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey God’s commandments.
Love one another, just as I have loved you.
Keith Grogg Carolina Beach Presbyterian Church Carolina Beach , NC May 17, 2009[1] Bryson, Bill. I’m a Stranger Here Myself. New York: Broadway, 1999; pp. 129-130.
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