Easter VI – B

May 17^th, AD 2009

Meadowvale Lutheran Church, Mississauga

Pastor Peter Lisinski

“OUR MOST IMPORTANT NEED”

(Text:  John 15:9-16)

If we were to take a survey of what people believe is their most important need for a fulfilling life, most of us, I suspect, would answer, “Love”.  And if we were to probe a little further, most of us, I suspect, would say something to the effect that our most important need in life is to be loved.  And that is very important.  But in today’s gospel Jesus, I suspect, is saying the opposite; our most important need for a fulfilling life is not to be loved by others, but for others to be loved by us:  “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”

We human beings are created in the image of a God whose very nature is love.  We might even say that what makes God God is the one and only divine need:  the need to love rather than to be loved.  Take worship for example.  God invites our worship not because God needs our worship in order to be divinely fulfilled, but because you and I need to worship God in order to be humanly fulfilled.  Our worship of God is, in fact, an expression of God’s love for us more that it is an expression of our love for God.

And the full extent of God’s naturally self-giving love for us is expressed in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, who is the very incarnation of God’s divine nature in human history!  And Jesus promises that to the extent that we human beings reflect God’s self-giving love in our personal and communal life, we nurture the divine image within us toward its destined fulfillment:  “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.”  Jesus’ joy is the divine joy of God’s natural, self-giving love for us and for all of humankind.

Of course, being only human, self-giving love is not as natural for us as it is for God.  Even the naturally self-giving love most parents have for their children most of the time can become a joyless burden when the stresses of time, energy and finances stretch us to the limits of our physical or emotional strength.  Jesus’ commandment to love others as God loves us is more than we can achieve and maintain by our own will power.  Self-giving love, the kind of love that puts another’s fulfillment in life ahead of our own – the sacrificial love that lays down one’s own life for the benefit of others – has to be learned, nurtured, and practiced!  That’s why God invented the church.

The church is the place where we learn, nurture, and practice Jesus’ commandment to love one another as God has loved us.  “Abide in my love,” Jesus invites us. “Just as I abiding in God’s love.”  And he goes on to tell us that God has chosen to reveal his divine presence in the world through the church, and in the life of every believer who strives to reflect God’s unlimited love:  “You did not choose me but I chose you.”  We who have heard Jesus’ call to discipleship are the visible sign of the future God promises the whole world; and we are sent to call the whole world into God’s promised future by our faith active in love:  “I appointed you to go and bear much fruit, fruit that will last.”

We who are born again by water and God’s word in the sacrament of Holy Baptism, and whose faith is nourished and sustained by Jesus’ own body and blood in the sacrament of Holy Communion, are living proof that God is love, and that the mutual love of God – God’s initial love for humanity and humanity’s responsive love for God, is our world’s only hope for the peace and joy God wills for all God’s children.  The good news of the Gospel proclaims that, in the cross of his only-begotten Son, God has absorbed and redeemed all the pain and grief the world has suffered on account of humanity’s mutual inhumanity toward one another.  Jesus’ crucifixion proclaims the Gospel truth that the world can and will be saved only by the self-giving love of the one and only true God who shares our human suffering, and not by the self-serving power by which we inflict suffering on God and one another.

In Jesus’ death, God submits his divine immortality to our human mortality; and in Jesus’ resurrection, God exalts our human mortality to his divine immortality.  And in that mutual holy communion of God with us, and us with God, you and I and all whom God has called and chosen, are being saved – becoming the fully human children of God we were created, and are redeemed to be.  And the church’s only purpose in the world is to reflect – to incarnate – the light of God’s love in the darkness of the world around us in self-giving love for one another.

What a privilege!