Revelation 21:1-5a (NRSV Updated Edition)
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them and be their God;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.”
And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.”
John 13:31-35 (NRSV Updated Edition)
When he had gone out, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me, and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ 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.”
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What is the link between the two passages above? Could it be the word “new”, that the new commandment to love one another, to love in the way Jesus has shown us, which was previously unknown to us, is identical with God making all things new?
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"[O]ur two texts tell us that the divine love always precedes human love, and that only the divine love is able to remake the world..."
- Robert Hamerton-Kelly, from sermon delivered on May 9, 2004 (source no longer available online)
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"I think it important to acknowledge that we start out not knowing what love is. Only that way can we adopt the attitude of humility before God, which is essential for learning love. Too many of us assume that the ability to love is a natural endowment that we all have and need not learn, but in fact love is not natural but supernatural and needs consciously to be accepted and learned from God, if we are truly to show it to our fellow human beings [...]
"Jesus says two things about the new commandment: that it is new, and that it is like his love for us. “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another even as I have loved you.” Therefore, our love is to be both something new and an imitation. Is this a contradiction? To be new means to be original - there has never been anything like it before. To be an imitation is to be unoriginal - there is by definition something prior to imitate. How do we understand this? Clearly it means that since the love we are to practice is like the love that Jesus shows, it is as new and unprecedented as Jesus the incarnate God is new and unprecedented, and that our imitation of it makes us new too, new in such a way that people can see that we are his disciples, that we are imitating him [...]
"Let me propose a description of love as the [New Testament] intends it: love is the life of God in the lives of men and women. It takes the form of an imitation because all identity and all culture comes by imitation [...] Love is the life of God in us by means of imitation, that is, we love when we imitate the life of God revealed in Jesus Christ. The dynamics of this imitation is called the Holy Spirit, and he is precisely the Spirit of Love."
- Robert Hamerton-Kelly, from sermon delivered on May 6, 2007 (source no longer available online)
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"We are familiar with Jesus boiling all the commandments down to love. In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, he is asked about the Greatest Commandment. His answer combines the two most important Jewish commandments: Love God with all your heart and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself.
"Today in John’s Gospel, it’s all about love, too, but Jesus calls it not the Greatest Commandment but a new commandment. It’s not a combo version of traditional commandments about love. It’s a new one. Do we realize just how new it is? Do we realize how much everything changes when Jesus commands us to love like he loves us? Do we realize that that means he is basically asking us to love like God loves? Is that even possible? What does that mean?
[...]
"“Love one another just as I have loved you.” [...] It asks us to go beyond the safe boundaries of our ordinary human love. It represents a love that goes beyond what we usually think of as love of God, family, and nation. It goes beyond loving our neighbor as ourselves. It invites us to love like God loves with a love that crosses safe boundaries, a love that reaches out to the Other, a love that even reaches out to enemies.
"Why? Why would we take such a risk? Why love with a love that, in a still dangerous world, is dangerous? [...] But this dangerous love is also a victorious love. We might be moved to risk such a love because it is the only thing that ultimately will make this world safe. And because it’s God’s powerful love that has already paved the way for us. It never has to be about depending on our human love alone. God’s love in Jesus Christ has already come into the world and begun to turn things upside-down. It came into the world crossing all our safe boundaries to the point of being killed on a cross, and on Easter morning came as the promise of victory.
"It is this love, God’s powerful and victorious love, which created us in the first place. It is this victorious love that conquered death on Easter morning with the promise of conquering death for us and for the whole creation. It is this victorious love which is even now reconciling all the world into a New Creation, into a place where there will one day be no danger because there will be no enemies, no being over-against someone else. That victorious love is working in this world even now to change it for the better."
- Paul J. Nuechterlein, from sermon delivered in 2016 (https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/easter-5c-sermon-2016/)
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"[H]e says, “I give you a new commandment,” not that you love God above all things but that you love one another. “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” In other words, the definition for the new commandment is to notice something that has been done for you: just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. In the degree to which you become aware of what I am doing for you, so you will be able to love one another. And this is really very striking, because it's not a moralistic commandment at all. It's much more like an illustrative commandment: here I am opening up the way for you; now that it is open, you will be able to run along it. And please notice that the first example of this is him giving himself away [in the verse immediately preceding today's text] as a sop [of bread] to Judas, to the one who betrayed him. He's talking about loving even Judas: “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”
"And then he says, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” In other words, it's not if you obey certain commandments or if you keep certain regulations, it's because you will obviously be giving yourself away in the midst of rough, turbulent humans as I did. In as far as you do that, you will have peace amongst yourselves, and people will recognise that you are following me, because that's what I've done. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
"Again, just stressing the fact that it's someone doing something for us. And as we allow ourselves to be formed by the reception of what is being done for us, so we will be able to love, and so we will be recognised as being like him. But it's that way round, this is the absolutely key part of how the resurrection life comes upon us: not as a series of commands or a series of moralizations, but as a taking us into an awareness of being loved, of what he has done for us, so that we can begin to relax into being loved and to love each other without envy or fear or ambition or rivalry. Because we know that he gave himself away, so we can give ourselves away. And that it's as we do that that we will no longer be obstacles, blocks to each other, and we will find ourselves on the inside of the resurrection life, which is what our celebration today is all about."
- James Alison, from video "Homily for Fifth Sunday in Easter 2022 C" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_FBbi_K3gs)
[Source of link to Paul J. Nuechterlein sermon, and for further discussion and reflection on this week's lectionary texts: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/easter5c/]
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