In the gospel reading today, Jesus says, "As the Father has loved Me, so I have loved you; abide in my love…I have said these things to you so that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete" I wonder if the disciples heard that sentence the same way I do today.
We could look at the life Jesus lived as evidence of the kind of love the Father has for Him. Jesus was born under questionable circumstances. Mary & Joseph may have believed the message of the angels, but everyone who knew them probably suspected that Mary was guilty of immorality at best and adultery at worst. As Jesus became a man, He was sent out into His ministry with no fanfare and few words of encouragement. The Gospel of John says that "[Jesus] came to what was His own, and His own people did not receive Him."[1] He wandered the land between the Sea of Galilee, the Jordan River, and the Dead Sea for three years. He was often homeless. He was often surrounded by friends who did not understand Him. He was often surrounded by crowds of people who cared little for His teaching – they only wanted Him to heal their illness or just feed them for one more day. In the end, Jesus returned to the place where He knew He was needed most: Jerusalem, the center of Jewish life in Jesus' time. He taught in the Temple. He walked through the city, healing the sick, the blind and the lame. He confronted the people who had turned the Temple into their private empire, and in angering them with His prophetic word, Jesus signed His own death warrant. Jesus was crucified for many reasons, but one of the most compelling reasons was this: He opened the grace of God to all people, and the religious authorities, the ones who had spoken for God for centuries, would not have it so.
This is the love the Father bears for Jesus? This is what Jesus would give to His disciples? This is the gift of the church to Her children? Yes – this is the great gift that the Father has given to the Son, and the gift the Son has passed on to us, His friends: the gift of complete joy.
Jesus did many things during His time on this earth. Jesus walked among the poor and needy, and shared the burden of their poverty with them. Jesus came into the lives of the sick and the blind, the deaf and the lame, hearing their cries for healing and wholeness. Jesus met the outcasts and the Gentiles, the whores and the drunks and the tax collectors, all people who had never been welcomed by the church, and He welcomed their company. But in all this, Jesus did more than just listen to the people who came to Him. Jesus did His Father's will and gave Himself to them, completely and unreservedly, and in so doing Jesus entered into the complete joy of His Father's love.
This is the other side of the love the Father bears for His Son, Jesus. God the Father trusted Jesus to serve His brothers and sisters, to heal the sick, to preach good news to the poor, to welcome the outcast and the Gentile, even to raise the dead. God the Father trusted Jesus to speak a prophetic word to the church, to call the righteous and the holy to turn away from saving themselves and turn toward saving the world. God the Father trusted Jesus to pour out His life and His love for others – and God the Father knew that in doing all this, Jesus would find complete joy, as a branch finds joy in drawing its life from the vine and bearing fruit. And so this is what happened: Jesus did His Father's will, loved the world with reckless abandon, and great and complete joy was His.
Last week we read John 15.1-8, and we talked about the vine and the branches and what it means to abide in God's love. This week we see how one may abide in the love of the Father – through bearing fruit. When branches and vines are working together as they are intended to do, there is a unity and mutuality that leads to an abundance of fruit. The vine and the branch do not focus on what they receive: they focus on what the fruit they may bear if they work together. And so Jesus and His Father do not focus on what they receive from one another – they focus on the fruit they bear by working together: the fruit of creation, of God's children, forgiven and set free to serve in the world. Jesus' complete joy comes from obeying His Father's will; and Jesus' complete joy will also be in us when we obey our Father's will. Complete joy does not come from receiving great love: complete joy comes from giving great love.
George Bernard Shaw once said,
"This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy."[2]
Saturday night, Kristin and her mother and I went to a concert by Peder Eide in Fargo, and Peder pretty much said the same thing when he said, "I don't want to get to the end of this life and say, 'Well, that was kinda cool.' I want to get to the end of this life and say, 'WHHOOOAAAA, that was awesome.'" The joy that Jesus wants for us is a joy that comes from throwing ourselves whole-heartedly into this life and love that God the Father has created.
You heard in the children's sermon today how our friends are found in our love for them. I have been convinced that the measure of joy in our lives will be determined by the height and depth and length and width to which we love. The more unreserved our love, the more complete our joy.
Is this dangerous? For heaven's sake, YES! We become vulnerable to rejection, to ridicule, to a lack of return for our love. But we knew that already, because we know what happened to Jesus when He loved as His Father loved: He was crucified. Knowing this, we know that complete joy is different than complete happiness: deeper, more powerful, but also more dangerous and more uncertain. But God has not called us to be certain or safe or even happy: God has called us to love, and to discover in that love the complete joy of doing the will of God.
Paul Tillich once wrote:
"[Joy] is not a thing one simply has. It is not easy to attain. It is and always was a rare and precious thing. And it has always been a difficult problem among Christians. Christians are accused of destroying the joy of life, this natural endowment of every creature. The greatest of the modern foes of Christianity, Friedrich Nietzsche, himself the son of a Protestant minister, has expressed his judgment about Jesus in the words, "His disciples should look more redeemed." We should subject ourselves to the piercing force of these words and should ask ourselves, "Is our lack of joy due to the fact that we are Christians, or to the fact that we are not sufficiently Christian?"[3]
Tillich warns us that a final danger in all of this is that complete joy can become as much a pursuit as works righteousness or overzealous piety. We can make complete joy our goal and make it into an idol, just like the Vikings or the Packers or the Cornhuskers or that new car or that bigger snowmobile or being thin or being muscular or running 26.2 miles. But this isn't the way it works. Notice that when Jesus asks His disciples to follow His commandments, He doesn't call them servants anymore. He actually calls them "my beloved." The disciples are "the ones Jesus loves." Jesus asks His beloved friends to love one another as He has loved them, so that His joy may be in them, and that their joy, like His, may be made complete by giving great love to one another. The complete joy of the Father's love for Jesus is given to all of us as we love as Jesus loved, as we serve as Jesus served, as we live as Jesus lived, as we pour ourselves out for the sake of the world. The moment we see another person as a means to complete joy, we lose both the person and the joy. How, then, can we experience compete joy? Philip Yancey offers this answer:
"What would it mean, I ask myself, if I too came to the place where I saw my primary identity in life as "the one Jesus loves"? How differently would I view myself at the end of a day? Sociologists have a theory of the looking-glass self: you become what the most important person in your life (wife, father, boss, etc.) thinks you are. How would my life change if I truly believed the Bible's astounding words about God's love for me, if I looked in the mirror and saw what God sees?[4]
What God sees in you is a beloved child, a beloved friend of Jesus, one who is loved so much that God would give His own life to spare yours. What God sees in you is a creature that God loves, and that love gives God complete joy. We who are baptized have been claimed by that love, and now that our lives have been so claimed, we need not fear what others may think of us – we only need to love the world as God has loved the world, and our joy will be complete. "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God, and everyone that loves is born of God, and knows God." May God's love for you make your joy complete in loving one another. Let us pray:
Lord Jesus Christ, you wish that we would love like You do, so that our joy may be complete.
But love like Yours is impossible for us, without Your help.
Fill our hearts with Your love.
Fill our lives with Your indwelling Spirit.
You say we are Your beloved friends, the ones You love;
burn Your love in our hearts so that we will respond with complete joy. Amen
[1] John 1.11
[2] George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, Epistle Dedicatory
Irish dramatist & socialist (1856 - 1950)
[3] Tillich, Paul. The New Being © 1955, Scribner & Sons.
[4] Philip Yancey What's So Amazing About Grace?
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