A mild ‘atmospheric river’ was forecast for Saturday through Sunday afternoon which meant that rain would be falling continuously with temperatures in the low to upper 50s. It was not what anyone would call good outdoor soccer weather, and yet from Vancouver and Milwaukie and Eagle Creek family members gathered to watch a nine-year-old, first-season-ever soccer player in a game with two 20-minute halves and a five-minute halftime. It took nearly as long for some of the spectators to arrive. The game was intensely played despite, or perhaps because of, the mud and rainfall. There were whoops of joy as “our player” scored for the first time ever in a game, and then scored again! We would not have wanted to miss that. Afterward, we gathered sopping wet umbrellas, folded chairs with frigid hands, and offered our player muddy hugs goodbye as we headed for the warmth of home. Love was the fuel that got us up and set the direction of our morning.
Love figures prominently in the Gospel of John and in the Johannine Epistles. This Sunday we hear from I John 4: 7-10 as the second reading and John 15: 9 -17 for the Gospel. Love as it is expressed in New Testament readings is based on love as it was understood in the Hebrew Scriptures, although it is given a slightly different sense because the New Testament unites Love of God and Love of Neighbor in a way that is not found in the Hebrew Scriptures. Love, in the Hebrew Scriptures, as well as the New Testament, was different from the way we usually understand love today. In post-modern belief, love is primarily connected to individual relationships or preferences, and to sexuality. We extrapolate love of community and ‘other loves’ from that primary understanding. However, the scriptural meaning of love begins with God’s love for us and expands with the response to God’s love, which is expressed with loyalty, obedience, mutual care, and concern. We love God when we love what God loves and live as if we love God.
When the Gospel of John, and the Epistles of John were written, the Johannine Community was living under great stress. In order to survive, there was a high need for the community to live in a mutually supportive and cohesive manner. When the community spoke of love for one another, they were primarily thinking of their own particular community members. They were in effect hunkering down in the face of pressure from family and friends who were not followers of Jesus, and in light of the growing threats from the Roman Empire. The community was setting itself apart intentionally. Love was not simply a way of life that they chose, they understood the call to love as a directive, a commandment from Jesus himself.
Friendship is another theme we hear today. Friendship was a major theme in Greco- Roman culture which had two kinds of friends: political friends and fictive-kinship friends. “Political friends were clients who received favors from patrons and in return sought the good reputation of the patron.” (pg. 236) Fictive-kinship friends treated each other as if they were family. Such friendships could be inherited with friendship tokens passed from generation to generation. A token presented from a family friend obligated the recipient family to provide some prearranged service, a proper burial for example. (ibid) These kinds of friendships were between social equals unlike political friendships which were not. It was important for citizens of Rome to be “friends of Caesar” – political friends that is, who did what Caesar expected and kept track of one another. (Malina and Rohrbaugh. Social Science Commentary on the Gospel of John. Fortress Press. Minneapolis. 1998)
In the passage from the Gospel, Jesus calls his followers friends and declares that “no one has greater love than this; to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” When Jesus called his disciples friends, he did so with an intimacy that implied fictive-kinship friends, and at the same time he gave them another way to resist being friends with Caesar. When he told his disciples to love one another as he loved them, he was calling for a community of generational fictive-kinship friends. Scripture has any number of references to teachings of Jesus that were inclusive of all people. There are others, like those we will hear this weekend, which were written at a time when becoming a cohesive community was imperative. It is tempting to skip over the context of the passages and go right to inclusivity because that feels better even if it would be disingenuous. Christians are called to be friends – fictive-kinship friends who stand by one another even in dangerous times.
The peculiarities of our day and age pose interesting questions and steep challenges for how we form and keep friendships among the many diverse and estranged followers of Jesus. Within a single congregation members may come from a number of different neighborhoods, or even from different cities. Large churches may have several different services that members move between. Sometimes there are different ethnic communities within the larger community. Size alone can interfere with the ability to know one another as friends – and yet we are called to be a community of friends who love one another as Jesus loved us, not just within our local congregation, but with the entire Christian Community!
The only commandment attributed to Jesus in scripture is that we love one another as he loves us. “If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love” Jesus said. And then he gave us his one commandment: love one another. In a time when just showing up at church on Sunday morning is an act of resistance, we need one another more than ever. When our airways are spreading all kinds of untruths and half truths about the One who has called us “friends,” sharing truth together will give us courage. Like John’s community in the early church, followers of Jesus today need to make time and space for strengthening our commitment to God and to one another.
The mild atmospheric river will still be flowing tomorrow. It will be easy to talk myself into staying home where it will be dry and warm, but sometimes, the first step toward love is just showing up.