With this new commandment Jesus steers us away from vague feelings of warmth or from any delusion that our love for others should be patterned after ourselves! In fact, I have sometimes thought, the old commandment, Love your neighbor as you love yourself, may well identify the problem of the world. Everywhere people do love others as they love themselves, which very often means—not much at all, since huge numbers of human beings are filled with self-loathing, self-hatred, and shame. It really could be that the problem with the world is that we do love others the way we love ourselves! Dysfunctionally! Poorly. Or not at all.
But Jesus says, Love one another, just as I have loved you. In doing so, he gives our love for one another a particular shape—a pattern by which we are commanded to live our lives.
This is the night of pattern. On this night we remember the footwashing Jesus enacted as the pattern of his humble, servant love. And we remember that this is the night when he shared table fellowship with his disciples, his last supper with them. In his words over the bread and cup we hear the pattern of his love, anticipating the Cross of Good Friday: this is my body, given for you. This is my blood, shed for you.
Love one another as I have loved you. Think of how it is when you trying to enter into friendship with someone. If they invite you to their home for a good dinner, you know that if you wish to continue with the developing friendship you will need to invite them over for a dinner at your home, and that dinner will need to be on a par with theirs. If they gave you a great steak, you’re not going to offer them a cheese sandwich and a bag of chips! It’s the pattern: we want to honor the friendship by doing what the other has done for us. In Holy Communion there’s an invitation into a friendship with God that leads us to honor the pattern of Christ. We’ve sung this pattern all Lent: keep in mind that Jesus Christ has died for us, and is risen from the dead.
At a lecture not long ago I heard noted Biblical scholar, Dr. Luke Timothy Johnson, talk about this patterning. Commenting on the heroism of the 9-11 rescue workers, hundreds of whom lost their lives in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, Dr. Johnson supposed that many of the New York City rescuers were of Irish and Italian background—Catholics who from toddlerhood on up attended mass virtually every week, and encountered the sacrificial language and ritual of communion, this is my body, given for you; this is my blood, shed for you. Dr Johnson wondered whether this Eucharistic patterning of Christ formed the deep motivation for their headlong rush to rescue in the face of deathly danger, leading them to give their lives for one another and for those they so desperately intended to save. And could they be, then, a sign of how the Church—the body of Christ in the world--is meant to live and love?
I am giving you a new command. You must love each other, just as I have loved you. Loving, like him, even into death trusting in the everlasting miracle of Life greater than death, sorrow, self, or sin. Thus we honor and obey the pattern of Christ. Amen.