What’s New?

Maundy Thursday
April 9, 2009

The Reverend Paul Abernathy

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.”^[1]

What’s new about Jesus talking about love? In the synoptic gospel narratives, Jesus responds to a question about the greatest commandment, saying, “You shall love the Lord your God will all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and your neighbor as yourself,”^[2] thereby combining two great teachings of the ancient Hebrew Torah.^[3]

So, again, what’s new?

Before I go on, I’ve always had trouble with that second part: loving my neighbor as myself. I don’t always love myself. At times, I’m not even sure how. So, if I am to love you as I love me, then many are the days when I can’t love you. It’s the same dilemma with the fabled Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.^[4] It’s intended as a guide for goodness (so I won’t even address what, given human malice, may be the more practical rule: Do unto others before they do unto you!). However, as I don’t always know what my own good is, I can’t do unto you very well.

My trouble with the greatest commandment aside, the newness of Jesus’ love is in the nowness of the moment of its utterance. Jesus, knowing he is about to die and having loved and loving his friends “to the end,” his end, shares his last will and testament, saying, “Love one another as I have loved you.” Love, Jesus says, no longer only to the extent you love yourself, but rather, with the totality, the finality that I will demonstrate on the cross. What’s new about this love is that it has no qualifications, no quantifications.

As I think about trying to love this way – totally, unqualifiedly, unquantifiably –it occurs to me that my love, in any given instance, still can fall short. No matter how accurately I perceive your need and no matter how faithfully I respond, you may want or need more. And my love isn’t something I can increase on demand by doing more, much less, being more. Nevertheless, in the instant moment, what I have to give is all that I can give. It is in the how of my giving – as I choose to give in the totality of my self – that demonstrates whether I love you as Jesus has loved me.

A final word… Although the newness of Jesus’ love is directly related to his dying, therefore, demonstrating the total and final extent to which this love must go, Jesus issues this command to govern the life of his followers in community. “By this, all will know that you are my disciples.” Jesus isn’t calling us to die for one another. If we did, there would be no community. What Jesus is calling us to do is to live for one another, in each and every moment, totally, without qualification or quantification.

And this, my beloved St. Mark’s community, is the love we need. Not dying for one another and certainly no longer beating up and, therefore, figuratively, but no less painfully, killing one another, but rather, living for one another. And because we, St. Mark’s, don’t like things easy, here’s some good news. Living for one another is infinitely harder than dying for one another. Living for one another takes longer and lacks glamour. Living for one another means enduring the daily difficulty of our familiarity one with another and, therefore, dealing with those moments when we may not like one another very much.

Yet, know this, the mission of Jesus, the reason Jesus came into the world was that we might have life and have it more abundantly^[5] – totally, unqualifiedly, unquantifiably. And though we may not have opportunity to die for one another, each of us, in each and every instant, has a life to live for one another. And if we actually attempted to do that, that would be what’s new!

[1] John 13.34a. The gospel passage appointed for the day is John 13.1-17, 31b-35.

[2] Mark 12.30-31, adapted. See also Matthew 22.37, 39

[3] Deuteronomy 6.4-5 and Leviticus 19.18b

[4] Matthew 7.12; Luke 6.31

[5] John 10.10b