“Cross Carrying”
Text: John 15: 11-17,26-27 the Message
11 "I've told you these things for a purpose: that my joy might be your joy, and your joy wholly mature. 12 This is my command: Love one another the way I loved you. 13 This is the very best way to love. Put your life on the line for your friends. 14 You are my friends when you do the things I command you. 15 I'm no longer calling you servants because servants don't understand what their master is thinking and planning. No, I've named you friends because I've let you in on everything I've heard from the Father. 16 "You didn't choose me, remember; I chose you, and put you in the world to bear fruit, fruit that won't spoil. As fruit bearers, whatever you ask the Father in relation to me, he gives you. 17 "But remember the root command: Love one another. 18 "If you find the godless world is hating you, remember it got its start hating me.
26 "When the Friend I plan to send you from the Father comes - the Spirit of Truth issuing from the Father - he will confirm everything about me. 27 You, too, from your side must give your confirming evidence, since you are in this with me from the start. †
loving with great love
Memorial Day we celebrate those who demonstrate what Jesus calls the greatest kind of love—putting oneself in harm’s way for the benefit of others. It is those who lay down their lives for their friends, brothers and sisters, and countrymen who best exemplify this kind of Christlike love.
Our key verse is verse 12:
This is my command: Love one another the way I loved you.
Jesus commands—yes, commands—us to love one another as he loved us. This would be easy enough if Jesus were merely nice and basically good to his disciples, but that is not the case. The way Jesus loved us is by suffering for us and dying for us while we were yet his enemies by sin.
In short, Jesus loved those who hated him. That is the challenge to us: loving those who hate us.
As I’ve said right through this series, love only communicates as love when it is irrational. Loving those who hate us is a wonderfully irrational kind of love, and it is therefore the ultimate witness—the most Christlike of loves.
As we talk about our witness to the world, this is the ultimate witness: loving those who hate us.
And here is our action step. Here and now, today, we are going to start loving those who hate us.
starting here and now
We’re going to start today, for it is our calling to love one other as God loves us. Yes, it is the high bar, but it is also the major leagues of love. Mature love begins when we get beyond loving those who love us. Even beyond loving those for whom we feel natural indifference is seeking to love those who hate us.
If you think hate is too strong a word, then let me just appeal to your memory and imagination. Can you think of someone in your life who is a total pain in the back (or perhaps a bit lower)? Someone whose presence is intolerable. Maybe it’s someone who has hurt you in the past, or someone who seems to belittle or debase you whenever you’re in the same room. Someone, perhaps, who you disrespect or, to be honest, completely loathe.
Ask the Spirit to locate someone whom you need to work on as an enemy—someone who hates you.
You might be thinking:, “Why? Why bother? Why try? Why can’t I just enjoy the company of people I enjoy and let them be someplace else?”
First of all, they may already be someplace else, but if they occupy a place in your heart, soul and psyche, then they are not gone. They are still with you and you are still carrying them around.
Secondly, it is commanded by God. Sorry, but as with forgiveness, there is no opting out—no escape clause enabling you to despise and hate anyone.
For the moment, forget all of the other commandments and focus here: this is the major leagues—loving as Jesus loved us is all that matters. We must work on loving our enemies and loving those who hate us, for this is precisely how Jesus loved the world and how he loves you and me.
Please allow me to walk us down this unspeakably unreasonable path in meditation.
Anything less falls short of Christian love.
Talk all you like about love, sing all the love songs, all the hymns, but until you love your enemies—until you love those who hate you—you and I practice convenient loves, and we have a partial witness at best.
In my heart, I want that partial witness. I love all of you here in church—can’t we just live in this loving fellowship together sharing God’s blessings of warmth and mutual love? And yes, we’re willing to invite others inside, but do we really have to deal with evil people?
The problem is that we all prefer a Christianized comfort zone, but it is a bubble, and our calling is not to stay inside of our bubble.
Our witness begins when we get out of the bubble. When we do, our lives change.
everything changes
As we begin to love those who hate us, several things happen:
1. Our own anger, resentment, and hatreds begin to dissolve.
2. We find healing of our injuries. We no longer make our way through life like the walking wounded, or even like the overly-sensitized and easily-wounded. To the contrary, we are given a new empowerment: our enemies lose their capacity to hurt us. How great would that be? The same slings, stings and insults simply flow around and past you. When we love those who hate us, we become less vulnerable to injury, not more. The darts don’t hurt as much or in the same way. We garner a kind of unflappability through which loving becomes easier and easier. We just have to start.
3. We walk in obedience to Christ and know the blessings of doing so. We know we have stepped out of the bubble and are at least on open ground and in the game where our witness can begin to impact our world.
But this is crazy
Yes, it is a high bar, but when we resolve to turn from nurturing our personal sense of injury—our love of having the upper hand of victimization—we step into a great walk and a more excellent kind of love. We begin to love in the way that Christ commands—a way that looks like his love for us.
What is more, our witness needs it, because this kind of loving gets the right kind of attention and prompts others—especially our enemies—to ask the right questions, such as “How can you possibly love like this?” Our witness as the Church to the world demands that we love those who hate us and prove to be Christ’s disciples. It is simply doing what Jesus did.
You and I personally need this kind of witness, because by it we are healed of our own hatreds and learn the depths of God’s love for us.
In our deepest wishes, we should want to get out of the bubble of self-concern and the self-legitimacy of having been injured. We can begin to love only once we step out of ourselves and into a pattern loving boldly.
command & promise
The good news here is that we are not alone in trying to climb this mountain. We are empowered by the commandment to love, for the command contains an implicit promise:
You SHALL love your neighbor as yourself
God’s promise is that it will come to be by his work rather than ours. It means that as we trust his Spirit to work in us and through us, we shall be enabled to do what is impossible in our own strength. This is why we call this series WIThNESS, because our hope is never in ourselves, but our witness is God’s with-ness working in and through us. What we have to share with the world is not a strategy for salvation or a plan for which others are expected to subscribe, but Christ himself. When we share the gospel, we are to share nothing less that the Spirit himself.
The good news is that though our personal feelings resist, feelings can change. We can be changed. Our perspective can change. Our perspective may need to be changed.
Again, consider the benefits of radical love.
1. We obey Christ’s singular, all-encompassing command.
2. We find we have a powerful witness—one that awakens our enemies—even God’s enemies—to the reality of his love.
3. This love isn’t an academic exercise. When we love our enemies; it drives them crazy in a good way. Not in vengefulness, but we want them to be driven crazy in the same way we’ve been driven crazy by Christ’s crazy love for us.
A Way to Pray
I am your pastor. I love you and care for your spiritual development, but I can’t do it for you (I can barely manage it for me!); but I can give you a few useful tools. I can’t make you use them; I can only set them before you and encourage you to use them. It is entirely up to you whether you use them or not. Today I’m going to give you a prayer that is a tool in the endeavor to love those who hate you.
Close your eyes please, and imagine yourself in an empty room with two chairs that face each other. You sit in one. You feel content and relaxed. Now in that chair across from you—no more than three feet away—see your enemy seated facing you.
This may be hard, but begin by taking note of the negative feelings within you: anxiety, loathing, fear—take note. Name them to yourself.
Your mind is full of fresh reminders over how they have injured you or continue to injure you.
God desires that all those feelings be washed away and replaced by love.
He knows you can’t do it yourself, but he offers something better: He will do it with you and for you.
Jesus, who loves you infinitely comes up behind your enemy. He stands beside your enemy with a hand on their shoulder. He looks at you with love— perfect, infinite love. You know he loves you.
Now you also see that he loves your enemy as well. He looks at them with perfect, infinite love. He knows their guilt and he is willing to pay for it.
As you watch, he raises your enemy up by the hands, faces them, and embraces them. Your enemy breaks down into tears of sorrow over their sins. Tears of contrition and repentance.
See how Jesus loves them! Jesus loves them infinitely. Jesus loves you infinitely.
And you begin to feel more generous toward that person. You see the sinner that you’ve always seen, but you also see something of yourself reflected back.
As you need God’s mercy, you see they too need God’s mercy.
Jesus looks at you, and as he does, a light shoots out from his heart and hits you straight in the chest, and you feel half the burden of your feelings for your enemy lifted off of your soul.
The old anxiety starts falling away like scales.
You look to your enemy and begin to see that person through Jesus’ eyes. You can see how Jesus loves them.
And you love Jesus. You want to love as Jesus loves. You repent to him.
You renounce your judgment. You renounce your injury, you take it off like a dirty coat. You renounce your claim to justice, revenge or getting even.
It drops from your hand like a revolver.
Your heart longs to live in that space of Christ’s love and grace. You hunger for that love. You want it and want to be in it. You want that love to flow from you as it does from him.
You want love and grace for yourself and for your enemy and
nothing else matters.
Nothing else.
Nothing.
†