Sermon: "Blink", May 17, 2009, John 15.9-17

Fr. Gordon Byce was telling me about a book he is reading right now, entitled Blink (Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, 2005, Malcolm Gladwell). It is about what we are able to understand from quick impressions, what the author refers to as thin-slices of experience. What we take in, so to speak, in the blink of an eye.

In one experiment, a group of high school students were given lists of unconnected words, and from those lists, they were to pick four words and compose a sentence. This they did. But you know what caught the attention of the researchers. After the experiment, the students left the room together and were all observed as a group, walking slowly and lethargically down the hall.

Because scattered throughout the rows of words were specific words related to old-age: elderly, aged, creaking. Without knowing it, these old-age adjectives had slipped into their thoughts and they waddled down the hall like a geriatric gaggle of decrepit geese.

Fr. Gordon’s observation was - what power there is words and thought, even thoughts that seem merely to skim across our minds.

Along those lines, our passage from John is a remarkable one.

Repeatedly, and at crucial points in John’s Gospel, it comes back to this theme that following Jesus Christ we are entered into a deep and intimate relationship with him and, through him, with God. And that the blood which enlivens this relationship is the self-sacrificing love of Jesus Christ. And without this love, it all falls to the ground. Or, as the passage from last week would put it, like a lifeless vine, we whither and die separated from the love of God.

But it is a point made elsewhere about this commandment that caught my attention.

What makes Jesus’ command to love new?

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. (John 15:12)

Or, as it is put earlier in chapter 13,

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. 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.” (John 13:34-35)

And so, what makes it new?

It has been said that this love which Jesus commands is new because it is different from the love revealed in the Old Testament. It contrasts with the love described in the Old Testament.

That’s not quite so. The love of our neighbours is strongly emphasized in the law, as is the love of strangers and foreigners (Lev. 9.18, 34).

And John’s Gospel does not seem to have a contrast with the Old Testament in mind. In fact, quite the opposite may be the case.

In Matthew’s Gospel, there are places where a clear contrast is being made. Jesus says, “You have heard it said” - in reference to an instruction from the Old Testament law - and then says “but I say”, in order to emphasize what is new or unique or distinct from the Old Testament.

“You have heard it said, do not murder. But I say, do not even hate your enemy.”

This sharp contrast between Jesus and the Old Testament does not occur in John’s Gospel.

Instead, as the great New Testament scholar Raymond Brown puts it, the command of Jesus to love one another is new because in Jesus Christ the love of God reaches its climax.

In Christ, the love of God shows its full intensity.

In Christ, it demonstrates definitively God’s destiny for his people and the world.

And in Christ it is offered - the great love of God is offered - as an intimate and personal gift from Jesus to his disciples.

The command of Jesus is new because in Christ the intensity of God’s love is revealed. God’s love for the unlovable. The relentless, inexorable reach of God’s love, traveling that road to the cross, fully aware of the anguish and agony ahead. And not to put too fine a point on it, Jesus meant what he said: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends (John 15:13). He gave his life, and across the generations Christians have simply and obediently followed the example he gave.

Secondly, and I think majestically, the love of which Jesus spoke is new because it fills full the hope of the prophet and the destiny for God’s people:

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when. . . I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord (Jeremiah 31:31-34).

But finally, this love is new because it has been extended to us personally by Jesus Christ - who lived in this world, who breathed this air, who knew our joys and satisfactions, our sorrows, our disappointments and defeats. We are invited by Jesus into an intimate, deep and familiar relationship with him.

Later, St. Paul would say this very thing of the Corinthian Christians:

You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all; and you show that you are a letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. (2 Corinthians 3:2-3)

It is personal. We are invited to know our Lord: through his presence in our hearts; through the sacraments through which we reach for him week by week; and in the fellowship of his body, the church. It is new, because it is personal, and is offered to each one of us. The offer of God’s love coursing through our veins, enlivening our lives.

For the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about Haiti and Sri Lanka. For obvious reasons. A terrible and bloody civil war in Sri Lanka. Abject poverty in Haiti, put to us powerfully last weekend by Fr. Max Accime. And last Sunday evening at Evening Prayer, a direct question was put to Fr. Max: Haiti suffers from debilitating poverty, it has endured successive corrupt governments, and it sits in hurricane alley. “Where do you find the strength to get up each day,” Fr. Accime was asked. “Do you have any hope?”

To which Fr. Max answered simply, “One can always hope.”

But I’ve been thinking, what do Christian do when faced with these sorts of circumstances?
What does the church do, in Haiti, in Sri Lanka.

Well, what is the church in Haiti doing: praying, feeding, teaching.

I mentioned to you a while back that I had met Dr. Jebanesan, principal at the Theological College of Lanka in Pilimatalawa, Sri Lanka. I asked him how they were responding to the civil war.

“Well,” he said, “we teach our students the Gospel. And to help them with that,” he said, “we send the Tamil students into Sinhalese parishes and Sinhalese students into Tamil parishes.”

What does the church do? What does the body of Christ do in response? With the intensity of the love of Jesus, rising from the confidence of God’s redemptive purpose in the world, and with this great love coursing through our veins as our Lord has invited us to share, the church does what these Christian brothers and sisters are doing: praying, serving and teaching. Praying for peace. Feeding and sheltering those in need. Building schools where the young can be given the chance for better lives, better homes, better nations.

And it’s the serving and teaching that matters most, right? Well, that was when I blinked. Blinked over words that I kept using: impossible, hopeless, intractable.

Impossible problems. Hopeless communities. Intractable hatreds.

But then I ‘blinked’. Impossible, hopeless and intractable are not Christian words.

What does the Archangel Gabriel say to a young maiden, chosen by the Lord to bear the Savior in her unopened womb.

“Nothing,” he says, “is impossible with God.”

What does the apostle Paul say to a frightened and persecuted people living in the belly of the Roman beast in the great city of Rome?

Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them . . . No, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink . . . Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. (Romans 12:12-21)

And what does the Almighty say to a stuttering shepherd, commissioned with the deliverance of a brow-beaten people out of the hands of the great Pharoah of Egypt:

“This,” says the Lord to Moses, “is why I have let you live: to show you my power, and to make my name resound through all the earth” (Exodus 9:16).

As Christians, we serve and teach wherever we go, but our mission begins with prayer, because we “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” the words of our faith, the hope of our lives, and the accomplishment of God in Jesus Christ. Prayer because in Christ the intensity of God’s great love is revealed. Prayer because in Christ we have the hope of this great love lifting God’s people and bathing the world. And prayer because from the loving wounds and outstretched hands of our Savior, we are given this love to course through our own hearts and lives for the sake of the world and the glory of God.

Let this prayer be our prayer today.