A Sermon about Unconditional Love

The Rev. Joshua Rodriguez
John 14:15-21
1 Peter 3:13-22

Jesus said to his disciples, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever.”

Let’s just start out this morning by admitting that this was a terrible verse on which to begin our reading from John’s Gospel. Whenever someone begins a sentence with, “If you love me,” it never ends well. N e v e r. I am not always the smartest person when it comes to relationships, but even I know better than that. And to hear something so conditional from the lips of Jesus, something that makes it sound like the gift of the Holy Spirit is really a loan, because it’s contingent on my good behavior, well, hearing something like that could send any of us into a crisis of faith. One of those deep childhood fears that many of us still carry with us is that we will somehow do something that will make us unlovable.

This is a manufactured crises, though, because our reading this morning picks up in the middle of a very long conversation that Jesus has with his disciples after the Last Supper. Jesus isn’t dumb enough to start the conversation with “If you love me.” This week, pick up your Bible and begin with John 13 before you read John 14. It makes everything make much more sense. It makes everything sound much less panic attack inducing to me. In context, Jesus’ conversation with the disciples reduces the number of commandments from 612—the number of commandments in the Law of Moses—to one: “Love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” That sounds a lot more manageable, doesn’t it? Jesus isn’t telling us that we have to be perfect to love him. He’s telling us that we can’t claim to love him if we don’t love our neighbors.

Now, I’m not sure if that makes things better for me. I am going to do much better with one commandment than I am with 612, but it’s still a really hard commandment. It’s one that I struggle to keep. However, what the compilers of our lectionary got right was pairing our reading from John’s Gospel with our reading from 1 Peter. 1 Peter points us back to baptism, where our attempts at following at following Jesus began. At baptism, we either made a lot of promises to God, or we had them made on our behalf and affirmed them when we were confirmed. They’re big promises. We promised to continue in the apostle’s teaching and fellowship. We promised to persevere in resisting evil. We promised to proclaim the Gospel by our word and example. We promised to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourself. We promised to strive for peace and justice among all people. But if you think back to the last baptism you attended, we don’t just say “I will” to these promises. We say, “I will, with God’s help.” We can’t keep the promises we make at our baptisms. Not by ourselves anyway. God knows this. God knows that this whole Christian life thing stretches us, that so often the thing that we know we’re supposed to do is just beyond our grasp. God knows this, and God accepts us anyway.

We don’t just do this at baptisms, for the record. We do it at ordinations, too. When Arianne and I were ordained priests, we made vows before God and the Church. We made really big commitments that we will never be able to keep perfectly on our own. That’s why, during our ordinations, the bishops who ordained us prayed that God would give us the grace we needed to keep our vows. We do this at weddings, too. After the couple has exchanged their vows, the congregation prays that God give everyone in the room the grace we need to keep the vows that each of us has made in our lives.

At each of these sacramental moments in our lives, we believe that God gives us grace. That’s what a sacrament is: an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. God’s grace isn’t confined to the sacraments. It pervades every corner of our lives. The sacraments are moments when we are assured of grace, but there are other moments of grace in our lives. That grace in which we live and move and have our being is how we love Jesus. That’s how I manage to love my neighbor as myself in spite of myself. That grace is what assures us, as St. Paul says, that neither height nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ. That grace is the Holy Spirit, our Advocate, moving in our lives. That grace is the assurance that Jesus will not leave us as orphans.

In his novel, Les Miserables, Victor Hugo wrote, “To love another person is to see the face of God.” That’s why the new commandment Jesus gives us is to love one another. That’s why we will never be left orphaned, because we see God in the faces of those we love. At our baptisms, a priest dipped his or her finger into a vial of blessed oil and made the sign of the cross on our forehead. That priest spoke words of grace and promise, calling us by name and telling us that we were sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as God’s own forever. Forever. At its heart, the Gospel is a story that tells us that God’s love for us is unconditional. That love, freely given, calls us to freely love. And, in doing so, we see God. Amen.