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A New Commandment We Are in The A New Commandment We are in the middle of what is called the Great Fifty Days of Easter, the days between Easter Sunday and the feast of Pentecost. Yet even though we are in the Easter season, the gospel lesson this morning is one that we might expect to hear during Holy Week, in fact we do hear it on Thursday of Holy Week. The setting from John’s Gospel is the final meal Jesus shared with his friends before he was betrayed, put on trial, and crucified the next day. The Last Supper is the event we celebrate on Maundy Thursday, when Jesus is at table with his disciples, and right after Judas leaves the room, Jesus offers his last teaching to his disciples. We heard a small section of that this morning. Jesus gives to his disciples what he calls a new commandment. In Latin, this phrase is “mandatum novum” – a new commandment. Over time, mandatum became shortened in English to Maundy, and that is where we get the term “Maundy Thursday.” Here is a new commandment, Jesus tells them: You are to love one another. Just as I have loved you, you are to love one another. Now love certainly is not a new commandment. The scriptures in the Old Testament repeatedly talk about loving God and loving your neighbor. Jesus himself had said that the summary of all the law and prophets was this: to love God with all your heart, and mind and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself. So, the instruction to love isn’t really anything new. But what is new is that Jesus presents his own love as the model for loving. Just as I have loved you, love one another. Throughout his ministry, Jesus invites his disciples: “Come and follow me.” He is doing the same thing here. As you have seen me love you, you are to love one another. That is an invitation to follow him, and live like him, and love like him. What does it mean to love as Jesus loves us? What is the way that Jesus loved us? We Christians say that Jesus was the love of God incarnate, in the flesh. The love of God took human form, and so when the disciples saw Jesus, they saw what the love of God was like. When we look at Jesus’ life, we can also see what the love of God is like. We look at Jesus and we see how he loved others; it was there in his teaching, as he taught about the kingdom of God, where all are welcome, and all are included. It was there in the way Jesus reached out to others, especially those members of society who had been pushed aside by others. We side. We see it in the way Jesus healed those who were sick and hurting, how he took children in his arms and blessed them. In how he told people who needed to hear the good news, “You are forgiven, go in peace, be on your way.” We see his love in how he washed the feet of his disciples at the Last Supper, and how gave them the bread and wine 2 and said, “This is my body, poured out for you.” Jesus gave himself, fully, out of love for others. Just as Jesus was the love of God incarnate, in the flesh, we are to enflesh, incarnate God’s love in our own lives. This is why we are called the Body of Christ. “Love one another as I have loved you,”Jesus tells his friends. “And this way of living, and loving, Jesus says, will be the mark of the community of the faithful. It is by this – this kind of love – that everyone will know that you are my disciples. You are my disciples if you love one another.” The Christian Church has often neglected this straightforward and essential teaching. According to Jesus, this is how you can tell who the real disciples are; this will be the sign of discipleship for the church throughout the ages. It is that simple, and that demanding. What matters in being a disciple of Jesus not necessarily all those things the church spends its time and energy over. Over the centuries, Christians have argued over doctrine and theological matters, but the gospels never record Jesus saying, they will know you by your theology and your doctrine. For we Episcopalians, it is good to remember that Jesus never said, “They will know you are Christians by your use of the Book of Common Prayer.” Jesus never defined a Christian by whether they had were immersed in water or had it poured over their head for baptism, yet the Christian Church as fought over and divided over issues like that. Being his disciple is about much more than the things we usually think of. Things like theology, worship, church committees, church structure – those things can be necessary, and are often useful in the life of the Church. But the truth is, Jesus had little, if anything, to say about those kinds of issues. What he did say is this teaching that he gave his closest friends on his very last evening of his life. Jesus not only teaches them to love, he commands them, “You are to love one another as I love you.” This is what it means to be my disciple. This kind of love is more than just how we think, or feel toward someone. This is a love that is lived out and worked out in all the complexities and messiness of life – where we live, and work, among our family members and friends and strangers, and in the larger community. It is love in action, love incarnate. The passage from the book of Acts that we heard this morning is a story of that love being lived in the life of early church. The Book of Acts tells us that Peter’s travels took him to a community of Gentiles. He shared meals with them, and he told them the Good News of what God had done in Jesus. As he was teaching them, the Holy Spirit came upon them, and they began to speak in tongues, just as the disciples had done on the day of Pentecost. These Gentiles accepted the word of God, and Peter ordered them to be baptized, and they invited him to stay for several days. 3 Now word of all this came to the attention of the apostles and other believers in Judea – that these uncircumcised, unclean Gentiles had received the good news of Jesus, and the Holy Spirit had been poured out on them. These apostles and believers, all of whom had been good Jews, were having a very difficult time with this, and they criticized Peter for associating with those sorts of people. So Peter tells this story of how it all happened: one day he was praying and he began to see a vision. There was something like a large sheet coming down from heaven, and in it Peter saw all kinds of unclean animals – animals that a Jew would never have touched, let alone eat for food. And yet a voice from heaven tells him, “Get up, kill and eat.” Peter, good Jew that he was, refused, because he knows the rules of what is clean – kosher – and what is not. He has lived by a strict dietary code his entire life. He knows what is acceptable and what is not, what is pleasing to God, and what is not. But the voice from heaven tells Peter to think again, in a new way. “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” In other words, the old rules have given away to something new, something bigger. And this remarkable vision is given three times, three times, just to make sure that Peter gets the point. Then the message of the vision is carried out in action. At that very moment, three strangers arrive at the house where Peter was staying, and the Spirit tells Peter, “Do not make a distinction between them and us.” What great wisdom for the church to keep hearing. Listen to that: no more are you to make a distinction between them and us – who is in and out, what is clean and what is unclean. The old rules have changed, the Spirit was telling Peter. Your old rules have changed. Do not call profane what God has called holy. Do not exclude what God has accepted. And as Peter takes action on this vision, as he begins to live this out, he begins to realize that the same Spirit of God that he and the others had received was now being given to others. “And who am I,” Peter says, “to stand in the way of God?” The Christian community has often been described as a family; we are called “brothers and sisters” in Christ. And God wants us to know that this circle of family is meant to extend far and wide. The sheet that Peter saw descending from the sky in his vision was enormous, and wonderfully inclusive. We need to hear this again so we can imagine living this out in our own day, in our own community. We need to remember that in God’s eyes, no one is unworthy, and no one is more worthy than another, because grace reaches out to include everyone. The kingdom of God reaches far, far beyond a single congregation, even far beyond the church.
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