Fifth Sunday of Easter: May 18, 2025 | The Rev. Nat Johnson

Readings: Acts 11:1-18 | Revelation 21:1-6 | John 13:31-35 | Psalm 148

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.

These words were first spoken to Jesus’ disciples as he prepared them for the agony they were about to face when he would be arrested, tried, and executed. The scene is John’s version of the last supper. Jesus has shared a meal with his beloved disciples, he has worked his way around the room with a towel and a basin, washing their feet, and now he asks them if they understand what he has done for them. “I have set before you an example. No servant is greater than their master, no messenger greater than the one who sends them. Do as I have done for you,” Jesus tells them. “Love one another,” he explains, “by this, everyone will know that you are my disciples.”

On the surface, the love command seems so simple. Love is the anecdote to the collective trauma the disciples are about the share. It is the answer to the questions they will be plagued with when faced with his excruciating absence. Love is the balm that heals the wounds of betrayal and denial. Love reveals the true nature and character of the community formed by the blood of the new covenant. Everything that Jesus taught and did was and is about love.

The dominant culture in which we exist today deprives us of the fullness of love’s content and meaning. Love, at best, is fleeting sentimentality. It is a feeling we fall in and out of, aligned with the ever-shifting whims of our desires. Love, at worst, is equated with weakness, demonstrated in our capacity for possession and dominance, and relegated to the confines of the transactional in an economy of scarcity. This is not the love that Jesus talked about or demonstrated. This is not the love the reveals the people of God, that heals the wounds of betrayal and denial, that soothes the grief of loss and the anxieties of uncertainty.

The love that Jesus talked about and demonstrated was so much more than a feeling, so much richer than the commodity we have made of it. “Just as I have loved you…” Jesus said. Jesus demonstrated his love by washing feet, by restoring people to community,

by feeding their hunger and healing their broken bodies, by liberating them from the tyranny of oppression. Jesus’ love was not something to be earned or bought. He offered it freely and abundantly, without regard to social custom or propriety.

I give you a new command, Jesus said, love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.

It seems so simple. And yet, even a fleeting glance at the world around us exposes how difficult true love really is. In their book, What it Takes to Heal, Prentis Hemphill suggests that “love…is to will another’s existence.” They explain that “To will someone is a generosity of our own spirit, a shift from scarcity, a faith in connection. Love is a kind of reunification… it’s not enough for love to exist only inside of ourselves. It seems to long for gesture, for expression, to be infused in all that we create… Love has the power, the potency, to transform us deeply – and, love is hard. It is the greatest vulnerability we can know.” [1]

Perhaps this is why it is so hard to come by, why it is so difficult to find examples of true love. We are shaped by a society that encourages and rewards our inclinations toward self-protection rather than vulnerability, toward safety rather than risk, toward hoarding rather than generosity. We live in a context of division controlled by narratives of fear intended to isolate us from the power of love. We are taught to fear difference, to make enemies of those unlike us, to seek self-preservation against all else.

Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.

The kind of love that Jesus talked about and offered is simultaneously an orientation and an action. Jesus’ love is oriented and shaped by a vision of restored creation. It is the vision we are given today in our reading from the book of Revelation. John tells us he saw a new heaven and a new earth. The sea of chaos that separates us from God and from one another has been abolished. God lives among mortals, wiping every tear from their eyes. God’s presence has consumed death and crying and mourning, pain has been erased. All things are being made new. John’s vision orients our love toward a reality that God is brining into being, toward a communion in which the devastation of violence and suffering ceases.

Prentis Hemphill teaches that vision “is a place of potential, where possibilities reside, where we retrieve through prayer or in dreams, visions for ourselves and for the world that make us more whole… Visions are a call, a conjuring, a glimpse into what can be… we name our visions; we say them out loud to bring them into being, and we move them toward fruition by staying the course.” [2]

John’s vision is a compelling vision of unity, harmony, and peace; a vision that teaches us to hope and that gives us the strength to persevere in loving as Jesus loved, even and especially in difficult times.

Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.

Oriented to and strengthened by the vision of the new heaven and new earth, love is expressed and made tangible in the ways we allow the vision to come into being, here and now. It is the active passing away of the old things and the active realization of all things being made new. We love as Jesus loved when we follow his example, when we restore the outcast and marginalized to community, when we bring a healing touch to the untouchables of our world, when we feed the hungry and clothe the naked, when we resist the narratives of scarcity and practice generosity. Love is a verb, an action, something that must be practiced rather than just felt. It is lived out through a ministry of presence characterized by empathy and courage, strengthened by its recognition that we exist in a web of interconnectedness.

Friends, love is hard. While love is never coercive, it is demanding. It demands to be expressed, it demands risk and vulnerability, it demands our openness to change and transformation. Paul tells us that love is patient, kind, not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way, nor does it keep a record of wrongs. Love rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. This is the kind of love that gives shape to our futures, that gives meaning to our lives, that has the power to change not only ourselves but the world around us.

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.

In a world hellbent on self-destruction, love shows us another way. A way guided by a vision of all things being made new, a way governed by practices of care and tenderness, of mutuality and willing one another’s existence, a way that is generative and life-giving. Love is a choice we have set before us today – let us choose to love, not as the world loves but as Jesus loves. Let us choose compassion and mercy, kindness and hope. And let our love bear witness to who and whose we are, as we follow in Jesus’ Way of Love. Amen.

References:

[1] Prentis Hemphill, What it Takes to Heal (New York: Random House, 2024), p. 191, 195.

[2] Hemphill, p. 7, 20.

image: Global Refugee Mural painted on the Kefa Cafe in Silver Spring, MD by Joel Bergner, 2009