Sermon at the Sung Eucharist on the Sixth Sunday of Easter 2018

Love is our meaning today. Love is the central word of our faith and the truth for which we live and die. We’ve just heard it in the gospel (John 15.9-17):

‘As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.’ (John 15.9)

To be alive is to be loved and to love.  Not to love is to die. To follow Jesus means to learn that I am loved. It’s the heart of the matter, the only life-task that really matters. I am loved, therefore I am. Or as Mother Julian of Norwich said, the 14th century woman mystic whose life we recall this week, ‘Love was his meaning’.  Love is his meaning.

How do we learn that?  Slowly and with difficulty, if you’re like me. But from time to time we glimpse life’s joyful mysteries; sometimes they take us by surprise and we catch our breath at the sheer wonder of them. Ellen and I became grandparents last July. Arlan has come into the world as a wonderful gift to his parents and to us. He could not be more loved by us all.

There’s a painting by the 19th century German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, Woman in the Morning Sun (1818).  It shows a woman standing in a field gazing at the rising sun.  She’s silhouetted against the sun and you’re standing behind her, so you can’t see the sun itself, only the clear clean light with which it’s bathing the landscape.  In a beautiful gesture, she’s lifting her face up to the sun’s rays and spreading out her hands towards it like a priest, saying ‘yes’ to life and embracing it not simply for herself but on behalf of all who look into the frame.

It’s an image of love coming to us as a sunrise of wonder that prises us open, bathes us in a new light. Love meets our deepest hungers and desires. We spend our lives looking for it, sometimes in ways that are destructive, addictive or obsessive.

St Augustine learned how even the sins of passion are really loves that have become twisted in the wrong direction. But the gospel, he says, baptizes our loves, purifies disordered desires, turns our longings round to face the sunrise and find their right focus in God. A Graham Greene character says that God is ‘all loves and relationships combined in an immense and yet personal passion’. 

It is easy to be platitudinous about love, to focus on good feelings and warm glow. So, it’s important to pay attention to how Jesus defines love, gives it shape and character.  There is only one test of love, he says; and it is this: to be loyal to its covenant, to keep its truth with integrity, to be self-forgetting, and as Jesus says to his disciples, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

This is far more than an emotional response. It is an act of the will to love like this.  If you can’t contemplate dying for someone, it’s arguable that you haven’t truly begun to love them. 

It’s worth reflecting on who we would die for, what would impel us to give up our lives for someone else.  For most, it is those whom God has given us to be intimate with: family, close friends.  These loves have clearly-defined human faces. For some it is love of nation and homeland: ‘the love that asks no questions, the love that stands the test’ as the hymn puts it. For others again, it is a genuinely altruistic love for the weak and vulnerable of our world who have little hope in life other than because of those who, literally or figuratively, lay down their lives for them in love and service. 

Whichever it is, this is the test Jesus applies.  To love one another is to be committed to going wherever it leads, loving even to the point of death.  This is the commandment we have received that we are to ‘love one another’.

The point of all this is that Jesus not only speaks about love but embodies it. The criterion of love he first applies to himself, as John puts it, loving ‘to the end’. Not so long ago we were with him in heart and imagination in the upper room on Maundy Thursday, on the night before he died. There he laid aside his robe and washed his disciples’ feet. Within a few hours, he would be arrested and tried and led out to die a criminal’s death.  And all for us, every human being: the measure of love is that it is cruciform; it goes right to the end. St Paul puts it like this: ‘God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us’. (Romans 5.8)

What Jesus is saying is that love is fundamentally sacrificial, self-emptying, giving its all and giving it to the end.  ‘Love’s endeavour, love’s expense’, is that it gives everything, withholds nothing, lays itself down for the sake of others.

We don’t need to be told when we are loved like this. We can know it in our marriages and in our friendships, in the care we receive when we most need it.  We know it when we observe how good people’s commitment takes them to the most dangerous and risky of places, to serve among the most vulnerable and most desperate, the people we especially hold in our hearts and prayers on Rogation Sunday. Above all, we know it when we gaze upon Jesus on the cross and find ourselves looking straight into the face of God.

God’s love is always moving among and between us and bathes this world in light. As Julian of Norwich said, ‘We only exist at all because God loves us: creation is the evidence that God is love.’  In all our stories we glimpse again how God so loved that he gave, and so loves that he goes on giving, laying down his life for his friends which is how he meets and embraces us.

It happens in every act of care and compassion we know.  It happens when reconciliation brings together broken peoples and communities and mends them.  It happens when our hearts are gladdened by some piece of music or poetry or work of art.  It happens in the birth of a child, the greeting of a friend, and the touch of someone we love.  It happens at the altar in the visible words of love: bread and wine, taken, blessed, broken and given.

In all these ways, and a thousand others, each moment, each hour, each day, love comes to us. She bids us welcome, invites us to her banquet, compels us to sit and eat. And then we are close to glimpsing the deep magic of the universe. We know that despite everything, love is its meaning, God’s meaning.