Christian Art | Easter To Pentecost
John 15: 9-17 | King James Audio Bible KJV | Daily Verses | King James Version
9 As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in my love.
10 If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love.
11 These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.
12 This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you.
13 Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
14 Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.
15 Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you.
16 Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you.
17 These things I command you, that ye love one another.
In our Gospel verses this Thursday and Friday, and also Sunday (B), Jesus develops on the parable of the vine and the branches with an injunction for us to be at one with each other, as with Jesus and the Father, through love. The love to which we are called is of a special quality. It is divinely inspired and a reflection of Jesus’ love for us, itself a reflection of the love between the Son and the Father. This is the new commandment.
It is truly an extraordinary relationship: as we worship Jesus, so too do we know he is our friend; God is with us in this way, sharing our life with us, to the extent of becoming incarnate as one of us. If we consider all the best qualities of friendship, then we know how to live as Christians.
Saint Paul speaks of these qualities beautifully, as he speaks about love, charity, caritas:
4 Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
5 Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;
6 Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;
7 Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
8 Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
9 For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
10 But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
12 For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
13 And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. (1 Corinthians 13: 4-13)
This, then, is the love of Christ which we are called to imitate. We are to love each other as Jesus has loved us, with utter selflessness, with no claims, no ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’, with complete giving and self-sacrifice where another’s needs require, with no thought as to how our good deeds to others might profit ourselves. This is friendship. Jesus Christ is the model of the good friend.
In these verses of the Bible, Jesus teaches us also that it is he who has chosen us. This is a great truth. Our very capacity to love flows from God. Our receptivity to God is itself a gift of God. When we love another human being, this is through the grace of God. Through this thought, we sense both the interconnectedness of all life on earth, and the loving presence of our Lord, each and every moment sustaining all life.
‘This is the Lamb’s flesh; this is his blood. For the Bread who came down from heaven declared: “The bread which I shall give is my flesh for the life of the world.” It is right that the appearance of wine should be the sign of his blood, for he said himself in the gospel: “I am the true vine.” These words show that any wine offered as a sign of his passion is his blood. For this reason the blessed patriarch Jacob had prophesied concerning the Messiah in these words: “He will wash his garments in wine and his vesture in the blood of grapes.” For he was destined to put on the garments of our body and wash them in his own blood.’ St Gaudentius
King James Audio Bible | Endnotes
Fullness And Perfection Of Christian Love | That A Man Lay Down His Life For His Friends
John 15:9-17 and 15:26-16:4 are passages that speak of the fullness and perfection of Christian love. In these verses, Jesus gives his disciples the command to love one another as he has loved them. This love is characterized by self-sacrifice and the willingness to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. It is a love that is not based on personal gain, but on the desire to serve and give to others.
The call to love one another is a central theme in the Christian faith, and it is one that has been emphasized by religious authorities throughout history. One such authority is St. Augustine, who wrote, ‘Love, and do what you will.’ He believed that if we truly love, we will naturally act in ways that are in line with God’s will. This echoes the message of John 15:10, where Jesus says, ‘If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love.’
The call to love is not an easy one, and Jesus acknowledges this in John 15:18-19, where he tells his disciples that the world will hate them because they do not belong to it. This is a reminder that true Christian love is countercultural and requires us to go against the norms of the world. But as St. Teresa of Avila wrote, ‘Love consists not in feeling great things but in having great detachment and in suffering for the beloved.’
In John 15:13, Jesus says, ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’ This is a call to the ultimate form of self-sacrifice, to be willing to give up one’s own life for the sake of others. This idea is echoed by the Catholic Church’s teaching on the ‘universal call to holiness’, which encourages all Christians to strive for a life of self-giving love. Pope Francis has emphasized this teaching, saying, ‘We are all called to be holy by living our lives with love and by bearing witness in everything we do, wherever we find ourselves.’
But the call to love can also be challenging in more everyday situations. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, ‘The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community.’ This reminds us that true Christian love is not just about grand gestures of self-sacrifice, but about daily acts of kindness, compassion, and forgiveness towards those around us.
In John 15:26-16:4, Jesus speaks of the role of the Holy Spirit in enabling us to live out this call to love. He tells his disciples that the Spirit will guide them into all truth and will testify about him. This is a reminder that the call to love is not something we can accomplish on our own, but something that requires the power and guidance of the Holy Spirit. As the Protestant theologian John Calvin wrote, ‘It is the Holy Spirit who imparts to us the strength to love, as well as the love itself.’
The call to Christian love is a call to love that is characterized by self-sacrifice, detachment, and the willingness to lay down one’s life for others. This call to love is challenging. It is a call that requires us to go against the norms of the world and to rely on the power of the Holy Spirit to enable us to live our Christian faith.
We process. Glass exhibition cases, old reliquaries. A forearm here; here a nun’s fingertip. In chapel, at a glance, there are the usual faces. But they all stand to attention. Jonathan breaks from the procession to – fire the organ with oomph and dignity: Ride on! ride on in majesty! The angel-squadrons of the sky look down with sad and wondering eyes to see the approaching sacrifice. When we’ve done the readings, the Arch holds that tree in his hands to deliver the homily. He rocks quietly on his feet, some few seconds, as if balance defeated it. A way you might affect as the Spirit moves… Copying. Then he says: ‘Our palm fronds may seem to us today rather dry. I mean this not in a literal sense, but by the standards of those who originally lined the roadways in order to welcome Jesus into Jerusalem, as they proclaimed Jesus to be the Messiah, who would be clambering up and ripping their palm branches fresh from off the trees. I think perhaps also our faith is somewhat distant from that of the people there on that highroad into Jerusalem, and something of our sense of the meaning has shifted in vividness from what it was then. And of course the expectation of all those many people is markedly different, but in many important respects the same. There are the same essential qualities to all our faith in God, which springs complete from our humanity, and that is one and the same in value for all of us, and time is consistent on this point. So then, let us renew the fullness of Catholic faith, and let us ask the Lord’s blessing as we embark upon our Holy Week. ‘Our Lord enters into Jerusalem in order to refresh us. He is to die in order that we may have life. There is a living reality here, both spiritual and as entangled in the joy of our daily living. We have Ladies’ Day where I grew up. They still have it, and they close the roads off, and little children parade, dressed-up like spring brides. When I was a boy, there was a May Day festival, and there was a May pole on the field, with the people dancing, like Morris dancers might be one way of visualizing this if you’ve never seen it, with their ribbons tied onto the top of the May pole, and they would weave around each other, dressing the pole, which is what we called it. It was like a dance with red and white and blue ribbons all hung off of the top of the May pole, which stood there all year, only like a telegraph pole, but it was concreted in, and then there was a slide, and swings – one baby-swing and two you could have a go at – terrible health and safety but that’s what it was in those days. ‘There was a round-a-bout – we used to run it round and round to try to get it off its central axis. It were rusty as anything and creaked like mad – on concrete. And climb up where it was all greased up at the top. Ruth, who was big as the next four of us, used to sit there sucking on the lollipops we nicked for her from Raddies, and she’d direct matters. We were trying to destroy it, and get it to dislodge from its central axis, and fly away – roll off into that farmer’s field, which he only ever kept for silage, but we never succeeded. There was a car someone had left there so we spent forever smashing that up, until someone who lived in one of the houses there took exception to our doing that, so he put thick grease under the door handles and gave us a right talking to. ‘It would only be a few stands, hot-dogs and things like that. The man selling the hot dogs would have his records on full blast. There’d be a couple of set-up stalls. Air-rifles – that sort of thing. But we all had them, and we all went shooting, of course, if not with twelve bores then with smaller gauge. Or pay a pound – I have no idea how much it was in actual fact then – it might have only been a few pennies – and we’d get all that time smashing up the crockery the man would put up for us to smash on the dressers. That was my particular favourite thing to do at these festivals, by the way, in case you were wondering. You got a little bucket of so many cricket balls. ‘I dread to think what went into those hot dogs. Probably EE rules would forbid it now. But it was a fair mix in those days. A lot of young people then were C of E. We’ve done a lot to hang onto our young people, which is a tremendous encouragement when you consider how things are, while in recent decades the Church of England hasn’t been so successful. People still want it on feast days and what are essentially now civic celebrations. It’s strange to see, though, how all the little stands there people have are run by the police and people like that along those lines. There’s no May pole. That was a sort of faith that ran and ran beneath all the theoreticals of it in the 1960s and the 1970s and into the 1980s. The May pole isn’t there now in the particular place I’m thinking of. Considering May poles were officially suppressed hundreds of years ago – as a part of the protestant reformation. One or two of you are probably thinking I’m remembering things from that time! ‘I should have liked to say that those processionals were so hardwired into us, that even after the last thirty years, when I became a bishop, they are still with us. They were […]
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