Rev Gav

How do we love one another?

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13.31–35)

The kind of love that Jesus asks his disciples to have for one another is agape love. There are different kinds of love including friendship love, familial love, and intimate love, but agape love is a godly, divine, self-giving, self-sacrificial, and unconditional love. It is the kind of love where we, ‘do good to those who hate us, bless those who curse us, and pray for those who mistreat us,’ and it is this kind of love that Christians are to possess.

There are a lot of people who claim to be followers of Jesus — from prosperity gospel televangelists, to fascist right-wing dictators, to benign bumbling Anglicans (like us?), but the litmus test for their authenticity is simple. Do they love one another with a self-giving, self-sacrificial, and unconditional love? Perhaps a more complex question to answer is, do I love others with a self-giving, self-sacrificial, and unconditional love?!

John, in his gospel, writes a great deal about love, but also about oneness, and the two are inseparable. New Age spiritualism asserts that everything will become a single collective and unified consciousness — that when we die we get reincarnated to higher and higher states of consciousness until we are ultimately one with the universe. On the other hand, earthly materialism asserts that we are distinct individuals and, although we can interact, we will never be harmonised other than that our atoms will be recycled.

Christianity lives with the paradox of being both.

The Holy Trinity — the very expression of God — is both three and one, and in the same way the Church is made up of individual members, we are also one with Christ and with each other. The Church is not only like a football team that is unified in purpose, or a community that is unified in values, but it is spiritually one.

The apostle Paul didn’t come up with a pleasant metaphor when he described the Church as the body of Christ for we are the body of Christ. It is the same Holy Spirit that fills each one of us. God lives in me and God lives in you, and therefore, at the core of the Christian Gospel is this unique truth that loving God and loving others is both different and the same thing.

I don’t think we’ve fully comprehended what it means that we are, through Christ, one with God and one with each other. I also don’t think we fully comprehend the implications of the Holy Spirit — the Spirit of the Father and the Son – living in me and also in you. We still collectively come to worship and direct the locus of our worship heavenward, as if God is somewhere else, when God is very much present within each one of us. We have become so inculturated with the dualistic idea that the material and spiritual are separate — that we are ‘here’ and God is ‘up there’ — that we miss the wonderful power and presence of our oneness with Christ in the present.

Jesus did not say, “Everyone will know that you are my disciples if you all sit in rows and direct your love to God in heaven on a Sunday.” No, he said that everyone will know you are my disciples if you love one another, and it wasn’t a suggestion but a commandment — a rule of life or way of living.

We, as Christians — as one Church — are called to minister to one another with a divine and godly agape love, and we can only do this because we are filled with and empowered by God living in us. The truth is that people will come to know Christ in and through us because our unconditional and self-sacrificial love is the very expression of God. God wants to reach the world with agape love and we are the vessels of that love.

Think for a moment. How would our church live and have its being if we all recognised the divine spark within each of us?

Every one of us is a temple of the Holy Spirit and a blessed carrier of the most precious gift to humanity. Of course, we are to worship the Lord our God and only God, but worship also means to ascribe worth to something — think of it as ‘worth-ship’ — and because each Christian has inherent value, we must ascribe that worth to one another.

The Holy Spirit is always outwards looking and looking to the interests of others, and the Holy Spirit in me seeks to bless you, the Holy Spirit in you seeks to bless me, and the Holy Spirit in all of us seeks to bless the world. We are called to minister in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit to one another and to our families, colleagues, friends, and strangers. I can meet God through you, you can meet God through me, and others can meet God through us. Just think about that! We hold the key to someone encountering Jesus because Jesus lives in me and Jesus lives in you. You have the power to love someone with a godly, divine, self-giving, self-sacrificial, unconditional love, and it is the most powerful thing in the universe.

And if you struggle with this idea, think about it practically. What truly wins over hearts and minds? Is it violence, retaliation, and retribution? No. Is it accumulation of possessions and wealth? No. Is it abuse and punishment? No. It is agape love, and it is yours to share. You are, “a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of Christ who called you out of darkness into God’s wonderful light.” (1 Peter 2.9)

The question is, will you keep God’s love to yourself or will you give it away? The choice is yours.