A Lectionary Reflection for the people of Thankful Memorial Episcopal Church for worship from home, May 9, 2021 Year B, 6 Easter

Acts 10:44-48
Psalm 98
1 John 5:1-6
John 15:9-17

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

On Mother’s Day, many of us think very fondly of our mothers and the ways in which Mom has sacrificed much in her life to make each of us who we are today.  My father used to say that the ultimate sacrifice of parenthood is that you spend all this time and energy trying to bring up healthy, well-rounded children and just when your kids get to be the age when they’ve become really interesting adults, the sort of folks you’d want to be friends with, they up and leave you with an empty nest. 

Well, if we are all of us children of our heavenly Mother, Jesus in John’s gospel asks us to be grown-up children.  This Sunday, we are called to grow up and into our roles as friends of Christ.  “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends,” Jesus tells his disciples in the Gospel of John.  “You are my friends if you do what I command you.  I 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.  You did not choose me but I chose you.”

Friendship, you see, unlike the relationship between a parent and a young child,is much more of a two-way street.  Friendship implies a mutual responsibility between friends.  When we enter into a mature friendship with someone, we’re not only acknowledging our trust in our friend, our faith that they will always be there for us, but we also offer those same benefits to that friend.  In any good friendship, both individuals will show up and work for the benefit of each other.

Jesus says it this way: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” 

So when Jesus invites us, his disciples, into friendship with him, when Jesus chooses us to be his friends, he not only promises to always be present to us, but also expects that we, too, will work for his benefit in the world.  When Jesus names us his friends, he gives us the responsibility of laying down our lives for him, just as he laid down his life for us. 

But what does that mean for us today?  Are there other ways to “lay down one’s life” for Christ than martyrdom of the sort Jesus experienced?  When we hear that phrase, to “lay down one’s life,” we tend to think of those saints who laid down their lives suddenly, who died while acting for a great cause.  But Jesus doesn’t say we must lay down our life all at once, all in one instant. Jesus says that we show the greatest love when we lay down our life at all.  So surely we can lay down our lives for Jesus’ sake over an expanse of time, over days, months, years, over a whole lifetime.  Most of us don’t have the opportunity to lay down our lives for Jesus in one specific instant.  Most of us are called to spend our whole life on Christ.

Doing so, laying down our whole life for Jesus, marks us as his friends.  And the way we do so is by following his commandment to “love one another as I have loved you.”  In her essay on this gospel text, writer Debie Thomas points out that, “on the face of it, this is a weird commandment.  Can we be ordered to love?  Does love obey decrees?”  She goes on: “Those of us who have kids understand full well that commanding them to love each other never works.  The most we can do is insist that our children behave as if they love: ‘Share your toys.’ ‘Say sorry.’  ‘Don’t hit.’  ‘Use kind words.’  But these actions — often performed with gritted teeth and rolling eyes — aren’t the same as what Jesus is talking about in John’s Gospel.”

But I would disagree with Debie Thomas here.  I find that – like so much else in life – when it comes to love, we may “fake it until we make it.”  The outward behaviors of love often help us to engender the feelings of it.  To put it another way, when we treat others as though we love them, we may find that, in time, we do.  In fact, that’s exactly how Jesus describes what it means to love others: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”  It’s the action (laying down one’s life), not the emotion, that counts as love. In simple, little, daily ways – things as simple as sharing toys or saying sorry when we’ve hurt another or phoning someone who is lonely or extending grace to someone who has failed us – these are the behaviors of love.  And when we act in this way – even and especially when we don’t necessarily feel the corresponding emotion – we follow Jesus’ commandment and we grow more into the full stature of Christ, into the fullness of friendship with Jesus.   

So being friends with Jesus means laying down our lives for others in actions small or great.  Being friends with Jesus means living a life that is other-centered, not self-centered.  Being friends with Jesus means spending our lifetimes on each other, on all of Jesus’ other friends.

And lest we think Jesus’ friends are only those of us in our inner circles, or even only those of us who share our faith, Jesus’ invitation to friendship with him in John’s Gospel is twinned in the lectionary this Sunday with an account from the Acts of the Apostles.  In that story, Peter and the other Jewish Christ-followers discover just how limited their understanding of Christ has been.  The first disciples of the resurrected Jesus thought that they knew just who was in and who was out of the “Friends with Jesus” club.  They assumed that the new covenant was only open to the circumcised: Jews were in, Gentiles were out.

But Peter, one of those Jewish disciples of Christ, kept being taught that the Spirit of the Lord doesn’t work on our own assumptions.  Through encounters with others again and again, Peter finally begins to understand that “the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles” and they are counted among the friends of Christ, too. 

Thus, Jew or Gentile, Episcopalian or Southern Baptist, conservative or liberal, vaccinated or unvaccinated, black or white or brown, native-born or immigrant, male or female, or anything else you can think of to be – all are numbered among Jesus’ friends.  We must learn, as Peter did, how unexpectedly Christ’s Spirit can move in the world and in our lives.  We, like Peter, must not limit our understanding of who else has been chosen by Jesus to be counted among his friends.  And so, we must show love to all people; we must lay down our lives bit by bit for all those the Spirit sends our way: it could be a person of a different color or a different gender or even a different faith from yours.  You never know whom Jesus has chosen to be his friend, whom Jesus has invited you to love as well. 

But here is the good news: You have been chosen.  Jesus has chosen you.  Jesus wants you to be his friend.  Christ has laid down his life for you that you might take it up for him, loving all his other friends, as you are loved.  Amen.