John 15:9-27
May 17, 2009: Sixth Sunday of Easter
I have a confession to make: I have misled you a bit with the sermon title this week. But, if it’s any consolation, I did so out of ignorance, not intention. I made an assumption about this familiar passage that was challenged by a closer reading of the text. I don’t think this passage is really about sacrifice – at least not as we traditionally use that word. When I originally selected this passage I imagined it meant that we are to be willing to sacrifice our lives in order to save our friends; I thought being willing to die was a mark of true friendship. “No one has greater love than this – to lay down one’s life for one’s friend.”
Concurrently, I wondered how in the world I would talk about that kind of requirement. I didn’t like the implications. I wondered if the model for our behavior was Jesus dying on the cross for his friends. Maybe we are supposed to be like the early martyrs of the faith – willing to sacrifice our very lives. Exactly what, I wondered, am I supposed to die for?
If you, like me, make this same assumption and fears it’s implications, we are in very good company. Most people who write about this passage claim there is a relationship between what Jesus asks of us and what Jesus did on the cross – sacrificing his life for his friends.
One writer in commentating on this passage says we should be “willing to go so far as to suffer danger and death to express love”. Another writes, “Friendship was such a key relationship in the ancient world … that friends ideally might sacrifice their lives for one another”. Certainly, all of us have heard this passage used in the context of soldiers being willing to lay their lives down in battle for their fellow soldiers. In a world that so values heroism and valor, this assumption that we’re being asked to be willing to sacrifice our lives for our friends is understandable.
It is quite possible this idea of giving up our lives exists in other places in our scriptures. There may, indeed, be times to sacrifice even to that degree. But that is another sermon.
This passage, in the gospel of John, really isn’t about that. It is about friendship – about what kind of friends we should be to one another. But, he does not talk about friendship based on a willingness to make a heroic sacrifice. He isn’t talking about us being willing to take a bullet to save our friend’s life. In fact, you might be interested to know, John never uses the word “sacrifice” in his gospel. Never. All of the other gospels do, but not John.
I did some word study this week, and I know the danger of boring you to death with such details. But, I realized early on that the English language is limited enough that it is insufficient in helping us understand this passage. These limitations come in many flavors. For example, one problem is that sometimes we have only one English word to use to translate multiple, distinct Greek words. There are three words commonly used for love in the bible…yet we only have the one word, love.
Another problem is that synonyms in English do not always correlate well to like words in Greek. For example, the Greek word “thysia” is used to indicate sacrifice of life. This is the word John doesn’t use. The other gospel writers use it in reference to Jesus sacrificing his life on the cross and to talk about animal sacrifice. Loss of life is implied in this word “thysia”. And while we commonly consider “laying down one’s life” as a synonym for “sacrificing one’s life”, the word here – the one John uses – for laying down one’s life for a friend is the word “tithemi”. These two words, thysia and tithemi, are not synonyms. They do not have the same meaning.
When you look at how John’s word “tithemi” is used elsewhere in the New Testament, you see that it is used when a person in need of healing is brought to Jesus and “laid down” in front of him. It is used in stories like the one where Jesus raised Jarius’ daughter from the dead by “laying” his hands on her head. When John talks about laying our lives down for our friends, he is not talking about death. He is talking about the way we are called to be in relationship with our friends – with each other.
There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for a friend. There is no greater love than to lay our selves, our very alive selves, in front of our friends and in doing so opening up space for the possibility for healing. “No longer are you servants,” Jesus says, “but I call you friends”. And why? Because, Jesus says, the disciples now know everything. Jesus has laid himself open to the disciples. He was vulnerable with them so they could be changed by him. This is a dramatic shift, from servant to friend. Jesus is requiring of them a relationship that is no longer hierarchical, it is mutual. This, Jesus says, is the greatest love.
John uses only the word “agape” for love in this passage. We know that “agape” is the fullest kind of love possible. It is the love we receive from God, it is what we are to strive for in our love for God. And agape is distinct from “eros” and “philia” love. “Eros” is love that encompasses some level of erotic or romantic love. And philia is conventionally understood as the love we feel for friends. But here, it is very clear, John calls us to love our friends not with philia love, but with agape love – the exact same kind of love God has for us. This is the most intimate kind of love. It is love in which we are completely known and choose to know another person in the deepest way possible.
I fear that in general we have lost this understanding of friendship in our society. We don’t really have a model for the love John writes about. We have our family, and often this approaches the agape level of love. Then, we either have friends that we feel philia love for. Or we have intimate relationships – and we seem to assume that all intimate relationships have an erotic component. There is not really a model in our society for intimate relationships with others outside of marriage or romantic relationships. And we generally don’t define friendship as the greatest love we can have.
Between John’s time and ours, we may have lost the biblical notion of friendship along the way. But some of the early Christian theologians knew how essential these relationships were. They wrote extensively about Christian friendship – and they absolutely believed it included agape love – complete intimacy. Thomas of Aquinas in the 13th century wrote of the need to see a friend as another self. We are, he believed, a part of each other as much as we are a part of ourselves. Augustine of Hippo, who lived only 300 years after Jesus, wrote, “this is what one says to one’s friend: Thou, half my soul”. What these writers knew was that friendship – biblical friendship – requires radical vulnerability. Laying aside our own egos, and entering into the reality of another person.
Jesus talks about this radical vulnerability as “abiding” in each other. We should live in, dwell, take up residence in, each other’s lives. And, in an effort to redeem myself a little big, I think this is where sacrifice does come back into the picture. We have to sacrifice our own egos in order to completely take on the world of another. This is what we do when we abide in God – our identity is no longer defined by the world, but by our relationship to God. We shed our egos, the personalities and expectations we and others have laid on us, and live completely in God. All that matters – our only identity – is that we are beloved children of God.
In the same way, we should shed our egos, our masks, our expectations and judgments – of others and self, in order to take up residence in someone else’s life. We sacrifice pride, control, comfort with the status quo – in short all those things which build walls between our true selves and the true self of an other. And, honestly, for some of us, these sacrifices might even be more difficult than imagining ourselves taking a bullet for a friend.
Think about the vulnerability this implies. We often care for others, we listen and help as best we can, we love and feel for the other. But do we abide in each other? As we keep finding in this sermon series, we are called far beyond conventional understandings of things like love, share, feed, and now friendship. In order to dwell in an other, we have to let ourselves be seen – the good and the bad, and the other has to become transparent to us. No putting on happy faces or hiding painful feelings. We take up residence in each other. We take on the world – the whole self – of another person in order to know them, love them, help them, heal them. They become another self. This is agape love. This is as intimate as it gets, really.
And no doubt, when we contemplate doing this, we uncover some big fears: Fears that we will be overwhelmed by another’s needs; that we will be rejected or judged; that we will lose ourselves completely; that this other person who I have completely opened myself to is just a bottomless pit of need that will never let me go; fear that we will be disappointed. We are no longer talking about a world of heroism or valor, this is powerlessness and vulnerability. This is the love we are called to have for one another.
And there seems to be yet one more sacrifice we need to make in order to have this love. The shocking thing is this: as we read on in John, we find out that when we build such friendships and love in this way, we run the risk of the world hating us. This is hard to imagine. Why would the world hate such beautiful love? Well, I don’t think people do, in theory. But, those walls, the ones we are to sacrifice, are what make us safe and secure. They protect us from our own deepest truths and feelings – often things that can be painful to look at, and they protect us from others knowing us more deeply than we would like. Those walls keep our fears at bay. The idea of vulnerability is so abhorrent in our culture that inviting someone into such a relationship – or worse, offering yourself like that to another – is not welcome. It disrupts the system and we don’t like disruption. Such a thing would meet resistance at least, but Jesus suspects such a life – which really is like the life he led – will attract actual hate.
We don’t like being vulnerable. It’s just not our way. Maybe with our spouse or partner, maybe with a close family member, but what would it be like to be this way with our friends. And I don’t think Jesus is talking about forming a couple of close friendships that look like this. He is talking to the disciples about how they should relate to each other and to the world once Jesus is gone. This is what it now means to be a disciple. They have been entrusted with the ministry of Jesus, and Jesus says that as they continue to abide in him, they will live like he did, love like he did: They will live with everyone as friends.
We are now the disciples. He is talking to us as a church. We are to live as friends, just as Jesus is our friend. Agape love. We are to live like this with each other – you and I and all of those sitting here today or those who are connected to our church. At least that’s where we start. That’s where the disciples began. Think about what this would mean. Our church would no longer be a place where we gather each week and care about what’s going on in each others lives. This would be where we would come and lay down our lives for each other. You life would become mine. We would become completely transparent, and we would choose to dwell in each other, taking on each others lives as our own. I would feel your pain as if it were my own. I would allow you to know those places in me that need healing and let you see the parts of me I hide from the rest of the world.
We often talk about church as a family. But Jesus says that family isn’t enough. We’re to be friends – deep, intimate friends – with each other. This is how we live as Christ. This is where it starts. But, as always, it doesn’t end here. Our common humanity with each person we meet is enough to enter into a friendship with them. After learning how to be friends here, we become capable of laying down our lives for people who are nothing like us. Maybe we can even lay down our lives for our enemies.
We will meet resistance. This is not standard operating procedure for everyday relationships. We will likely meet resistance in our own selves. But we have help. We have been given the Spirit of God, the spirit of truth, to guide us and embolden us. That spirit carries the friendship of God for us – connects us so intimately to God that we can say that we dwell in God. This is how we find what we need to then dwell in each other – to lay down our lives for each other. This is how we are able to make the necessary sacrifices to be true friends. Amen.
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Bibliography
Buber, Martin. I and Thou
Cates, Diana Fritz. Choosing to Feel.
Huey, Kate. Friends Together (http://i.ucc.org/StretchYourMind/OpeningtheBible/WeeklySeeds/tabid/81/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/193/Friends-Together-May-1117.aspx). Weekly Seeds, iucc.org, 2009
Kruchwitz, Robert B. I Have Called You Friends (http://www.baylor.edu/content/services/document.php/61816.pdf) study guide, Christian Reflection, The Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University, 2008.
