No Greater Love

Peace and mercy be upon all who walk by this rule, upon the Israel of God.
Henceforth let no man trouble me; for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

To walk ... upon the Israel of God. Where is this place? The Israel of God? We know from the Book of Genesis that Israel is a converted man — one who wrestled with an angel until dawn. From this experience he is to be called Israel, "the one who contends with God." For in this mortal contest, Jacob is forever changed, even physically altered, for he will now walk with a limp. The idea is that his physical body has been deprecated even as his soul has been magnified. In this vein, St. Paul, another one who has contended with God, tells us that

... far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,
by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.

For all of us the outcome of the mortal engagement with God — Paul terms this our crucifixion — results in, he says, "a new creation." The old man must die, and a new man is born. He says this over and over again in his correspondence.

This is the eternal pattern for all who would be called people of God, a man of God. godly women. After all, the descendants of Jacob-Israel are to be baptized in the Red Sea, cleansed of the old, worldly life of Egypti with its flesh pots. They are to be purged of worldly thoughts in God's wilderness. They are to be enlightened by their spiritual teacher, Who is God. And they are to become a people set apart from the world, godly, transformed men and women, which is collectively called, at its completion, the "Land of Promise." It is a spiritual geography, a land of milk and honey of the soul.

As with Jacob, St. Paul bears the marks of his conversion upon his body, the marks of Christ. St. Thomas discovers that the Risen Christ does as well. The Risen Christ, glorified by the Father and sitting at the right hand of God, bears physical wounds upon His Resurrected Body, eternally! Remarkable! For we might say that if Jesus is our Great Exemplar, and if this is the life to which we must conform ourselves, then we too must bear the wounds of our Savior, we, like St. Paul, must bear the marks of Christ.

Tell me, is this the Heaven you had in mind? is this the Heaven you pictured as a young boy or girl? I confide to you in some embarrassment that I pictured Heaven as something like my own private beach fronting clear, aqua water with perfect, tubular waves breaking just offshore on a white sandbar. Of course, there would be no sharks, no sea urchins to injure me, nor dangerous coral to cut my feet. But as we make our spiritual journeys, this is not the Heaven that we see with mature eyes, when we put away our childish thoughts:

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child,
I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways.
For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know
in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.
So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

The real Heaven, the one we learn about through the Gospel teachings of Jesus and throughout the Pauline Correspondence, is this one, defined in large measure by this one phrase: the greatest of these is love. Open the original Bible to 1 Corinthians, chapter 13, and you will see that shimmering word: αγαπη (agape) — self-giving, self-sacrificing, self-deprecating love. And our loving God crucified the world to Himself and Himself to the world in order to show us the way toward Him.

Does this sound .... crazy? Is this the message people want to hear? Well, may I share a truth that perhaps we rarely call to mind but is one of the great truths upon the earth? The world suffers. Most people in this world suffer. They are hungry. They are in want. I say, most people. And all over the world there are women and men following Christ who do what they can to relieve this suffering .... you see, because they have crucified the world to themselves and themselves to the world. Do they look glum bearing the marks of Christ? No, they are some of the most joyful people that I know.

I will share a personal secret with you. If you attempt simply to be among them, you will feel a tremendous relief sweep over your body because a great stone has been rolled off of you — the lie that all is well. Finally, the great relief of the truth, for you are in it now.

I do not say, "crucified for the world." Yes, "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son," but in hopes that people would be saved from the world in order to become godly themselves. For Jesus tells us,

"I am not praying for the world but for those whom Thou hast given me, for they are Thine" (Jn 17:9).

The Advent of Christ is to point us away from worldly life. He does put His imprimatur of approval upon the world because He so loved the world. He points us away from the world and toward the life-giving world of God, that we might also become the ones who are "Thine," the ones who belong to the Father. It is upon this one word — agape — that the world of God, the Kingdom of Heaven, revolves.

Heavenly life is a life of self-sacrifice, even of self-annihilation in order to give life to others. St. Paul uses the word crucifixion upon this point. Perhaps we do not think of it often, but is isn't this the Heaven we actually see and know? Do we not constantly petition the saints to intercede for us? Do we not ask beloved family members in the greater life to pray for us? Their Heaven, then, is a life of self-giving, of self-denial, of concern for us. If this were not so, then how is it that the great saints in light would pray for the likes of me? A ditch-digger on a remote island?

Certainly, this is the scene we find this morning in St. Luke's Gospel. The entire sequence of passages in Luke depicts the Son of God pouring Himself out in one act of self-sacrifice and self-giving after another: He tames the winds and waves for the sake of a small handful of fishermen. He crosses the Sea of Galilee to and exorcises an Aramean demoniac. He heals the woman who suffered from hemorrhage for twelve years. He raises the dead. I say, self-giving and self-sacrifice, but somehow that point is constantly lost in the conversation. We do not often stop to think that God sacrifices Himself for us — that He must subtract from Himself that we might have the addition of safety, soundness, and life.

A great crowd waits on the shore, a great mass of people in aching need. He has just landed from Aram, the land of the Geresenes, when He is instantly ushered off to the deathbed of a child. Already, though, He is diverted. The multitude reach out to touch Him. They believe that if they only might touch the fringe of His garment, that life and wellness might flow from Him to themselves. But do these same people also believe that each pulse of this life force will cost Him? He says to the Disciples,

"Some one touched Me; for I perceive that power has gone forth from Me."

The Disciples also seem to be oblivious to this intimate and most important principle, and they mock Him:

And His disciples said to Him, "You see the crowd pressing around you,
and yet You say, 'Who touched Me?'" (Mk 5:31)

we read in St. Mark, which is the original version of this story. Ignoring their insolence, He articulates the central principle of the Incarnation:

"Some one touched me; for I perceive that power has gone forth from me."

And He turns away from them to the people:

And Jesus, perceiving in Himself that power had gone forth from Him,
immediately turned about in the crowd, and said, "Who touched my garments?"

Life force has gone out of Him. The Greek word is δυναμις (dunamis), translated strength, power, the animating spark of life. The Authorized Version translates it virtue, influenced by the Latin virtus, which is the essence of what makes a man a man in Roman culture: valor, courage, character, worth. He pours it out.

I wonder how often we meditate on the life force that God the Son has poured out for us — His strength, His cares, His tears. Perhaps we believe that this is a New Testament thing. You see, it doesn't have to do with God. It's a Jesus of Nazareth problem. Surely, God in His perfect aloofness is above and beyond human cares. But the attentive reader of the Old Testament would say, "Do we not find this same caring, even these same tears, everywhere in the Hebrew Scriptures?

"What is like to be the God of the People Israel?" He asks the prophet Hosea. It is like being married to a faithless, cheating woman:

"For a spirit of harlotry has led them astray, and they have left their God to play the harlot." (Hos 4:12)

And in the Book of Jeremiah, He confronts His wayward and unrepentant spouse:

"How can you say, 'I am not defiled, ...' Look at your way in the valley; know what you have done — a restive young camel interlacing her tracks, a wild ass used to the wilderness, in her heat sniffing the wind! Who can restrain her lust? None who seek her need weary themselves; in her month they will find her ... But you said, 'It is hopeless, for I have loved strangers, and after them I will go.'" (Jer 2:23-25)

The self-giving and long-suffering God is to be found in the Old Testament from the Egyptian shores of the Red Sea to the last prophets of Israel and Judah. Repeatedly, we find Him pouring out His love, but it is not requited. "Do you love me?" He asks in His pain.

Yes, God the Father is perfect in His aloofness and not subject to human emotion. This is a great and ancient theological principle. The God we find in the Old Testament, then, displaying rage, grief, bitterness, joy, exultation, and, most important from the human perspective, forgiveness, is the God, Whose dimension is human ... as well as divine, the First-born of Creation, the One the ancient Hebrews called "Wisdom," the Only-begotten of the Father. And we must never forget that the Most Holy Trinity has eternally a human dimension, the Son — true man, true God. And His signature cry throughout the Sacred Scriptures is this: "Do you love me?"

It is not any love He asks of us: Not eros, romantic love; not philia, the love among friends, but also the commitment made to one's vocation; not even storge, for while we are adopted children of God, and Jesus is our eldest brother, storge, which is the bond of love shared among family members is not what He wants:

But He said to them, "My mother and my brethren are those who hear the word of God and do it." (Lu 8:21)

Well, this is an important principle! Therefore, what is the word of God? What is this thing we must do? If we are to choose only one word, the word of God, it is assuredly the one St. Paul calls greatest. These three abide, and the greatest among them is agape. Jesus says,

"Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." (Jn 15:13)

No greater love.

The Risen Christ on the point of His Ascension puts a test to Peter, and therefore to all of the Apostles and to all of us, Who wish to belong to the Father. This test should not surprise us. It is simply the test that anyone would ask of those most near.

Jesus said to Simon Peter, "Simon, son of John, do you love Me more
than these?" He said to Him, "Yes, Lord; you know that I love you."
He said to him, "Feed My lambs." A second time he said to him,
"Simon, son of John, do you love me?" He said to Him, "Yes, Lord;
you know that I love you." He said to him, "Tend My sheep."
He said to him the third time, "Simon, son of John, do you love me?"
Peter was grieved because He said to him the third time, "Do you love me?"
And he said to him, "Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you."
Jesus said to him, "Feed My sheep. Truly, truly, I say to you, when you
were young, you girded yourself and walked where you would; but when you
are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and
carry you where you do not wish to go." (Jn 21:15-18)

I submit that this passage is not intelligible until we read the Greek original and discover that each time Jesus uses the word love, it is the verb-form of agape. And each time Peter replies with the word love (in the English translation), he uses the verb-form of philia — the first-century word for "love among friends" or even devotion to one's vocation as in philosophy or philatelics, the love of stamp-collecting. Finally, we begin to see what is going on in this famous exchange. For Jesus is challenging Peter to commit to the love of self-sacrifice, but Peter draws back saying instead, "we can be friends" or perhaps "I will devote myself to my vocation," which is why Jesus rejoins with the flinty rebuke, "Then do your job!" — feed My lambs, tend My sheep, feed My sheep. Then Jesus takes His leave of Peter with these last words, the last He will ever say to Him on this earth (calling him "son of Jonah," "the one who ran"), "When you were young you pulled up your own pants and went wherever you wanted, but the day is coming when someone else must pull your pants us and carry you." Old age comes all too soon. But you, Peter, have chosen for this life over the greater life. We hear Father Abraham saying, "He received his reward."

We must have compassion on Simon bar-Jonah, for we are called to love our neighbor, and most of our neighbors, it must be admitted, have made Peter's choice: "What?!" they say. "Take up a cross and follow Jesus, offering my love sacrificially, always denying myself?! Isn't there some compromise? Some middle way?" The answer, of course, is no. No compromise, no half-way. For Jesus' "Yea is Yea, and His Nay is Nay." To be one of "Thine," to belong to the Father, we must enter the Father's world, talk the Father's talk, and walk in the Father's holy ways, uniquely revealed by His Son.

St. Paul tells us this morning,

Peace and mercy be upon all who walk by this rule, upon the Israel of God.

And what is this rule? It is the law of sacrificial love. And where is this Israel of God? It is the Kingdom of Heaven.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.