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| "Peter's Vision" H.D. Northrop (American 1894) |
“I give you a new commandment, that you love one
another.” (John
13: 34a)
As
Bob Dylan reminded us, “the times they are a-changing.”
Up
to this point we liturgical Christians have been celebrating the joy of Jesus’ resurrection.
At least that’s the theme of the first three Sundays in Easter in the Revised
Common Lectionary. Then, on Easter 4, we got the obligatory “sheep Sunday[i],” and this week, on Easter
5, we hear the disciples getting the warning that Jesus has already packed his
bags and booked his flight home to the right hand of the Father. He’s telling
these guys to put on their big boy pants and get used to doing mission on their
own without him. As he says in verse 33, “Where I am going, you cannot come.”
Stuff is going to be different going forward.
The
gospel lesson for Easter 5 (John 13: 31-35) comes on the night of the Last
Supper just after Jesus has done the wacky, counter-cultural thing of washing
the feat of his disciples. He’s basically turned the social order ass-over-tea
kettle by taking the slave’s subservient role for those who had been following him
around and hanging on his every word. This, he tells us, is how we love one
another. We serve without making distinctions.
Unfortunately,
being human, making distinctions is one of our favorite things to do. It’s how
we spend our weekends and holidays. We’re not real keen on Jesus’ “the last shall
be first” thing. We want to be first. Of course, if we’re first, that
means others have to be behind us, and we’re generally cool with that. As the
late Kris Kristofferson once so eloquently said,
'Cause everybody's gotta have somebody to look down on
Prove they can be better than at any time they please
Someone doin' somethin' dirty, decent folks can frown
on…[ii]
Jesus
has given us a pretty tough order: Love one another without regard to prestige
of place and without judgment. That’s just not how we roll most of the time.
But
it’s not impossible, either. Even Simon Peter took a while to get this “love
without distinction” thing figured out. Just look at the first lesson assigned
for Easter 5, Year C (Acts 11:1-8). God might’ve been a little too subtle for a
numbskull like Peter to get what he was after in the dream he sent him. Peter
didn’t quite catch on to the metaphor at first, not quite grasping God’s point
that, just as there are no unclean animals, there are no unclean people. I’ll
bet it was a test of his faith to believe that God could love and bestow the Holy
Spirit on Gentiles—and the same Gentiles who had occupied Peter’s homeland,
crushed his people with taxes, threatened them with violence, and hung his
buddy Jesus up on a cross. Nevertheless, he went and preached to them and
prayed with them and saw that, underneath it all, they were just the same as he.
Some other good Christians gave Peter a load of grief for welcoming these uncircumcised
foreigners, but Peter finally got it that in God there is no such thing as “them”
and “us.” There’s only us. And that must’ve been a shocking adjustment
for Peter and the early Christians to make.
It's
a pretty shocking adjustment for us, too. It upends our whole idea of ministry.
Why do we spread the gospel? The answer used to be to save souls. We had an “I’m
saved and you’re not” attitude. We could define who we were by contrast with
who we were not. But what if winning the world for Christ doesn’t mean getting
everybody to share our exact same theology or point of view? What if it just means
loving everyone as our equal? Even people of different faith traditions or no
faith tradition at all. Even people who have different sexual or gender
orientations. Even people who’ve come from or live in other countries or people
who belong to a different political party. Or people who have wronged us in the
past. Loving without a pecking order. Without desire for place or prestige.
Without judgment.
On
May 24 the ELCA commemorates the Christian mathematician, astronomer, and Roman
. Catholic canon Nicolaus Copernicus, who died on that day in 1543. It was he
who made the rather shocking—and to some, disconcerting—discovery that the earth
isn’t the center of the universe. No. The earth actually revolves around the sun,
and not the other way around. Not everything is about us. The world is changing
and so is the Church. Perhaps, in ten years, we’ll no longer be at the center
of American culture. Perhaps America will no longer be the dominant power in
the world.
Maybe
that’s what Jesus in John’s gospel is trying to tell us. Forget order and hierarchy
and differences in culture or opinion. These things will always change anyway. Just
love indiscriminately and let God do the rest.
Practice
compassion this week, my friend. And do come and see me again.
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