In these last weeks of the Easter season, you can feel our readings strain toward the next part of the story. We are now past the grief of Jesus’ execution, the surprise of the empty tomb, the hesitant hope of the disciples, and Christ’s multiple visitations after the resurrection.
Now, with new urgency, we are looping back to what Jesus said before all of that. From here on out, our Gospel readings will carry us into the urgency of the early church. They will compel us to hold onto the teachings of this revolutionary man and his disruptive, remarkable life, so, that we can get a grip on what it looks like, feels like, and takes to follow him.
We often call Lent the “season of preparation.” But it turns out, Easter is also a season of preparation. In this season, in the brightness of the resurrection and the refreshment of baptismal waters, we are being prepared to reaffirm our own resurrected life in Christ to be made new, and to strain toward becoming everything God made us to be.
In other words, we are being challenged to “do something” about the resurrection. Today’s Gospel reading makes clear what the resurrection calls us to: following in the footsteps of the “Son of Man,” we are to “love one another.”
“Love one another.” It’s basically the brand identity of the church. It is the mission statement and driving ethic of who we are as followers of Christ. The whole of Christian scripture hinges on these three words.
It’s simple, it’s obvious, and it’s part of Jesus’ inherited religious tradition, stretching back to divine laws given to Moses.
Specifically, Jesus is referencing God’s commands in Leviticus 19: “Love your neighbor as yourself; love the foreigner as a native-born, do not ridicule the Disabled, don’t privilege people based on their status, respect your elders, take responsibility for the safety of those around you, do not pursue vengeance or bear a grudge.”
With this callback to Leviticus, we are to understand that the love that Jesus calls the disciples to is not selective, or limited to the 11 people in the room that day, Because, as our passage in Acts also shows, the movement Jesus is building is an unconditional and unbounded one.
Followers of Christ are to be known, primarily, by their self-sacrificial love. This is not so much a brand-new commandment, but it does solidify a new kind of community.
Unfortunately, as a whole, humans have never managed to live up to the mandate. If we’re lucky, we can say that we have loving friends, neighbors, and families, but rarely can we say we live in a loving society, even in a so-called “Christian nation.”
It seems that part of the reason this theological mandate is so hard to follow is because we don’t really understand how to practice it. If it’s just a rule to follow, we will always have to work up the energy to do it. Because practicing love will always feel like an uphill battle in a world run by Judases and Pontius Pilates and Herods.
We will never be able to love like Jesus until we understand that he calls us – not to define, negotiate, and judge people against love –but to become love. We are to be transformed, so that our first impulse is care, invitation, and relationship, no exceptions.
We have to figure out how love becomes innate in us, not just a thing that we put on. To do that, we have to understand who Jesus is, not just what he says.
Fortunately, there’s a clue in the specific way Jesus identifies himself in this passage in John: Jesus is called the “Son of Man.”
In Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, the phrase would translate simply to “human one.” In Greek, the language of John, it would mean something like, “one who shares in humanity.” But the concept is originally a Hebrew one: “ben-adam,” Son of Adam: descendant of the one who is blueprint of humanity.
In the context of the Old Testament, the phrase is used most often to talk about a person who is literally just a human. The Jewish Encyclopedia says that ben-adam “denotes mankind generally in contrast to deity or godhead, with special reference to their weakness and frailty.”
So, when Jesus calls himself the “Son of Man,” the human one, he is highlighting, not his divinity, but his humanity. Which is to say, the quality of his being human: material, physical, emotional, relational. And, the quality of his being humane: caring about the wellbeing of others.
Jesus, the son of God, of one being with Father, is identified by the fact of his being a human. He is not denigrated for it, but glorified within it.
Therefore, Jesus reveals himself as the standard-bearer for what it means to be a human. He is the archetype and the blueprint of the human person.
And what does it mean to be human? Jesus says: “Just as I have loved you, you should love one another.” In this passage, Jesus redefines the human person as “one who loves.”
When Jesus calls us to love one another, he is not telling us to muster up the energy and repress the resentments, to put on a virtue that we can take off again when it suits us. In drawing attention his own, incarnate, humanity, he shows us what it means to be human, in light of the resurrection. He shows us who we are to become in the Kingdom of God he has already ushered in.
If Jesus is the blueprint of the human person – and the human person is one who loves, then we are out of touch with our own God-given humanity when we are driven by fear and ego to act in ways that are not humane. The selfishness, isolationism, authoritarianism, racism, deceit, and hatred that plague our communities are ugly distortions of the humanity Christ exemplifies. And if we are not careful, we will let our lives be ruled by these distortions.
If we fail to define the human person in view of Jesus, we will give away a little part of what makes us truly human, in exchange for false security and broken promises. We will let ourselves forget that Jesus calls us, here – enfleshed, mortal and imperfect – to resurrection life. He calls us to come out of our tombs to become love in a world that has forgotten its humanity.
The disciples who were gathered in the room with Jesus that fateful night in Jerusalem did eventually get the courage to be human, in light of the resurrection. They figured out how to love, how to change their minds, and how to stop worrying about what everyone thought about them.
And in response, the church grew like a weed. The outcasts were welcomed, the hungry were fed, the sick were healed, and young and old, rich and poor, worshipped together around full dinner tables.
The empire was threatened by the humanity of it all. Ten of the disciples in the room with Jesus that night died as martyrs. They died, because they had decided to become who they really were in light of the resurrection – human and called to love.
Our faith does not call us to comfort. It calls us to love. It is worth living this way, because only in risking love can we encounter our humanity as God intended it. And only in loving can we experience the joy and freedom of really being alive.
Will we accept the risk of humanity, and follow Jesus in his way of love? Or will we stay in our distortions, never getting out of the grave?
The resurrection dares us to do something. And now is the time to act. Amen.
References:
- A New Commandment, and a New Community, Andrew McGowan
- Son of Man, Jewish Encyclopedia
- Son of Man, Bible Gateway
- Sacra Pagina: The Gospel of John, Francis J. Moloney
Leah Wise 