If you love me ...

Pastor Kevin Sullivan

I don’t know how many of you remember the musical Fiddler on the Roof. It is, in part, about a family torn between the commandments of their traditional lives and this new-fangled notion of love. In the musical, Tevya’s daughters challenge the long-standing practices of marriage. Rather than submitting to the choice of the matchmaker and their parents as to who they should marry, they choose to follow their own hearts, to marry for love, if you can imagine anything so ridiculous and revolutionary. What about social standing? What about financial well-being? What about tradition? That’s not how we do things! Tevya and Golda’s marriage had been arranged just as everyone else’s that they had ever known, and this emotional thing called "love" had never been considered. But Tevya loves his daughters, so he stretches as they challenge him to reconsider his traditional thoughts on love and marriage.

And in the midst of all this, Tevya looks to his wife and sings, “Do you love me?” And there’s this wonderful little musical dialogue in which his wife responds with all the things she’s done for him … “Do I love you? For twenty-five years I’ve washed your clothes, cooked your meals, cleaned your house …” The song works this tension between what she’s done for him and how they’ve lived together, and it finally comes out that somehow, maybe this is love too, maybe there’s this flow between what we do and how we feel and express our love … “If that’s not love, what is? It doesn’t change a thing, but even so, after twenty-five years, it’s nice to know.”

In our Gospel text this week, Jesus starts out with “If you love me …” And I immediately think, Of course I love you. And by that I mean that I do, from time to time, have this warm feeling inside for Jesus. I appreciate all that Jesus has done, and I respond with “love” or something like it.

But as I meditated on the text this week, I kept hearing Jesus: “But, do you love me?” And I tried to go all Golda in my mind, and I came out with things I’ve done that show my love for Jesus. “For thirty-five years I’ve gone to church, brought casseroles to the potlucks, I played guitar at campfires. For thirty-five years I’ve sung your hymns …” And I think: Isn’t that good enough? Isn’t that proof of my love for Jesus?

Jesus says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” And I think, “Ouch, now that’s not fair. I thought it was all about grace.” But now you’re sending us back to the Law, back to the commandments, which we’re told we could never keep in the first place. Well, back to your commandments anyway: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, strength, and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself.” And back to “Love one another even as I have loved you.” And while that’s easier to memorize than the Ten Commandments—much easier than the hundreds of applications of the commandments presented in our Bible—it’s still tough, too tough. It’s impossible.

I can’t do it, Jesus! I can’t keep your commandments any more than I can climb Mt. Everest barefoot. It’s impossible. Do I love you? Yes, but I’m only human. When it comes to loving others with a perfect love, loving others as you have loved them, that’s an ideal that I can hold in my heart, but it’s a practice beyond my abilities, beyond my endurance, beyond my powers, and beyond my purity.

Then I calm down and realize that the real problem is that I read verses like this as if they were an entrance test. I read the “If you love me,” and I place the “then” in the statement where I assume it should go. I read, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments, and then I will send you the Advocate.” I read it in a manner that makes keeping the commandments a condition for Jesus’ love back to me, a love that will result in Jesus sending the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, and revealing himself to us.

But the scholars tell us that the better reading of this passage may be: “If we love Jesus, then we will keep his commandments.” And not only will our love result in our keeping his commandments, but Jesus will also ask the Father to send the one to help us, to stand beside us, to support, encourage, and advise us in the process. Even better news, the translators suggest that “keeping the commandments” doesn’t so much mean a rigid and perfect obedience to them as “holding them dear in our hearts.” Of course we want to follow them. Of course we strive for that, but the beauty is in the tension itself.

It’s a Law and Gospel thing. It’s seeing grace in tension with our ideals and our human weaknesses. It’s recognizing that Faith without works is dead, and at the same time it’s claiming that it is God’s grace and nothing else that reaches out to save us.

Now the verses sing; they state a wonderful fact of the nature of love. When we love someone, our feelings flow out into actions—sometimes silly actions, sometimes heroic actions, sometimes mundane actions like washing your clothes and cooking your meals. If we love Jesus, we give our love to God and our neighbors as Jesus loves them—coming to their aid, standing up for them when they’re weak, caring for them when they’re sick, voting for the issues that help the vulnerable even more than they help us, maybe even preferring that their issues defeat our issues.

That’s what love really looks like, not just the dopey smile we see in the movies as the music swells in the background. Love's the sacrificial action that offers the loved one what they need even at great expense to us. And in the actions of caring for others, a strange thing happens … our love is strengthened through the things we are doing. We find that sitting in our armchairs and trying to muster up warm feelings is not as fruitful as rolling up our sleeves and stepping out into action. It is so often in service to others that we find ourselves miraculously strengthened. We find new reservoirs of love. And we find Christ revealed to us.

It is often when we have given everything we could, when we are exhausted and spent, that we are most able to sense the presence of the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, sent in our time of need. And it is in these times of difficult following, practical giving, and generous sharing that we see Christ revealed in love just as he said he would be.

If we love him, then we will hold his commandments dear and He will send us the Spirit. He will reveal himself to us in love: Here is my commandment, that you love one another, even as I have loved you.

Jesus loves us patiently, daily, concretely. The love of Jesus heals the sick, the blind, and the lame; feeds the hungry; gives hope to the hopeless; takes the part of the poor, the outcast, and the marginalized. He spoke up for those who had no voice. He spoke out against those who would oppress the poor of spirit and the poor of wealth. Jesus loved us with a love that was limitless. He loved us with a love that gave us all the good that he had and was every day—in his teaching, in his signs, in his sharing of laughter and sorrow. He gave us his love in enduring the pain and shame of the cross. He gave us his love in his acceptance of death and the tomb. And he gave us his love in his conquest of death, his return to life, and his promise that “because he lives, we also will live.”

Let us go out and live on in his love. In his strength, let us hold his commandments dearly. And in the power of the Spirit that he sends, let us share his love with one another in all that we do. Today and every day.

Amen.