Scripture: John 15:12-17

My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. This is my command: Love each other.

Consider:

Remember that book which came out … gosh … maybe 30 years ago - Everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten? (I think that was the title?). The premise of the book was simple - the basics of what we need to know to live a fulfilled, happy life we learn in the sandbox and on the carpet circle during Kindergarten. Share with your friends, be kind, pay attention to the teacher. Don’t talk when it is not your turn.

This commandment - Love one another as I have loved you - is one we all learned in the equivalent of Church Kindergarten. It’s the first thing we teach our kids. Jesus loves me this I know - so I should love my neighbor as myself.

It’s always amazed me the ways we adults can create loopholes in what is a very straightforward commandment. We apply all this qualifying adjectives. Well, we say, I don’t have to love that person because they are a jerk. Or - the “hard love” equivalent - I’ll love that person when they learn to pull their own weight and lift themselves up by their own bootstraps. Or “Cruel to be kind” style of love where we shame and demean people so they will shape up and fly right. We put all these caveats and conditions on love so we don’t have to change our own point of view or sacrifice anything for the sake of those we deem unlovable.

There are no loopholes in Jesus’s commandment. Love is the center, the root of his story. There is no version of authentic Christianity that isn’t grounded in the purpose of bearing fruit by planting love - not the hard kind or the conditional kind, but the kind of love that requires sacrifice because it’s asks something from us to give it.

No qualifying adjectives to change it or shape love into something more comfortable.

There are no loopholes. No exceptions.

Respond:

Where do you put conditions on your love? Is there a person in your life to whom you find it particularly difficult to show God’s love?

What would need to change in your own attitude to offer them the kind of love Jesus offers to you?

I invite you to sit for a minute or two in that uncomfortable space between the knowing and the offering, naming the gap between your feelings and actions towards this person.

Then - don’t do anything. Don’t make a phone call or send a note. Just live for a few days in the tension to see what ideas might pop up for you. When you feel ready, then you can decide how to move forward with love and purpose.

Pray:

Lord, I confess the conditions I place on my love and the gaps where my heart remains closed. As I sit in this uncomfortable tension, transform my attitude to mirror Your grace. Remind me love has boundaries but not strings. Help me see others through Your eyes until I am ready. Amen.

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