For the past weeks after Easter we have been hearing gospel readings from one long scene in the gospel of John that on the surface are all about a long goodbye. All these gospels, including today’s, take place on the last night that the disciples and Jesus had together, the night before Good Friday. They are still in the same room, on the same evening, when Jesus washed the disciples’ feet as an example of how they should live. But they are still up late into the night talking, and there’s unspoken tension in the air, because everyone knows that the next night Jesus will be dead, and nothing will be the same for any of them.
The disciples are seeing the end of the only kind of relationship with Jesus they’ve ever known, and Jesus is trying to find words that will make it possible for them to keep going. And not only to keep going, but to realize that they won’t be without him. He uses image after image to tell them what it’s going to be like, He called himself a vine, and they are the branches, a shepherd and they are the sheep, the bread of life, and they will consume him. And today he says that above all, they will need to leave this room and go back out into the world, they will be soldiers mounting a frontal assault on the world using only love, no matter how discouraging it will be to be part of a world that can be so cruel to all of us.
It’s a hard sell, convincing these friends that they’ll be just as strong and just as persistent with Jesus gone as they were with him, in fact maybe even stronger. But if there’s one thing you come away from these scenes with, it’s a feeling of what a powerful relationship there was between Jesus and the people he loved so much, his friends, he called them, not his slaves, and on this last night, the only thing he’s concerned about is what will happen to them, and of course by extension, if we truly see what’s happening here, the only thing he’s concerned about is what’s going to happen to us.
Because here we still are, all these years later, also with a feeling of being left behind, in a way, in a world that may or may not feel like a place that is our home. It’s a world where sometimes it seems like Christians are on the decline, where it seems most people are not looking that hard for Jesus, where there are awful problems and conflicts that can’t be fixed. The enormous mess of this world is a great excuse to hunker down somewhere and work on our own business, to be angry or discouraged or just self-absorbed. We can easily set up a private corner of the world and live there busily working on things where we have a comfort level, or on problems manageable enough for us to handle.
But if we start living like that, this gospel stands in our way, doesn’t it? Because the message of this reading is that this world is where we belong and where we do our work. We’re here not to make the best of a bad situation, to live on an island in the midst of a hostile world, but to be people who love this world, and not just love it in the abstract, but to see it as a place where work needs to be done. Jesus loved this imperfect world so much, that he wants it transformed over and over.
We are here to mount a campaign against what needs changing in this world, not by lecturing or by self-righteousness, but by love, persistent and courageous. The disciples could have gone back to fishing and tax collecting, but there was work to do, and maybe this talk Jesus had with them actually worked, because as it turns out, even with Jesus gone from their midst, they felt the confident presence of the love of God with them. That is what we want, too.
That second reading we heard says that God is love. Not God wants us to love, or God loves us, although that’s all true, but that if there’s a word that describes what God actually is, why this world exists, love is the closest word. That is what this world needs to hear, that is the only message that will transform this place where we find ourselves.
There’s an evangelical pastor who has written a clever book called Left Behind and Loving It. You know, that’s us, we’ve all been left here like the disciples were, but our challenge is to love being here, to love this world. These disciples in the gospel were facing an entirely new life, and Jesus was telling them that despite everything, it would be a life of joy, centered on love. It’s available to us, too, if we are willing to leave our little corner of the world and embrace all the rest of it.