From the Daily Lectionary for Tuesday in the Second Week after Christmas
John 15:1-16
“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine-grower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit. You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and me in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples. As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.
“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.”
The writer of John is quite beside himself in artistic reverie. The prologue, if one read Koine Greek, is forcefully poetic; the proposition stunning: that Jesus is the embodied Logos, that he, his life and ministry, is the very “reasonableness” of the universe. He has always existed, and “nothing came into being except through him.” John’s language would be familiar to Greek philosophical scholars; quite foreign to the Synoptic writers. It draws from Plato and Aristotle. It smacks of the most arcane repository of intellectual discourse in the Mediterranean world of the early first millennium. His verse is soaring, passionate, sophisticated, but all of this erudition comes down to but one thing: “Love one another as I have loved you.”
Throughout this Gospel the writer speaks of “befriending” (φίλίόϛ). We post-modern westerners think of friendship as a casual acquaintance… a Bridge partner, a golfing buddy. But friendship among the Greeks of antiquity was far more. It was a philosophical ideal for the enlightened “man” (Yeah, I know). A friend only knows to serve the other; a friend will literally give up his life, her life for the other. Plato argues that it was this particular ideal that would make democracy as a form of governance work. A friend is characterized by sacrifice and utter commitment to the greater good.
To follow Jesus, to be aligned with the very truth of the universe, is to befriend the world, in particular the friendless, the ones left out, the ones who lack advocacy. John will go on to name the Holy Spirit, of all possible metaphors… the Advocate. Stunning, right? The Spirit moves us into passionate advocacy for the voiceless of our world. That is what, in short, holds the world together.
We post-Enlightenment Westerners are taught by the culture to search for the sure and certain, though scarcely-attainable, formula for the divine, to think rightly, to get on the right track, to discover the secret of the great “Other” that has so eluded us all our lives. But look no further, good people, than the empathy with which you were endowed by the Creator. Call on your capacity to love. Befriend your neighbor. There is nothing more good, more true than that.
A Penitential Preface to the Eucharist (BCP p. 351)
Jesus said, “The first commandment is this: Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is the only Lord. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.”
