Lay Down Our Lives
I’ve spoken of purification, obedience, and rejecting the world. We reject the world when we say Yes to Christ and No to the panorama of alluring sins in vogue under names like fun and freedom. So, are we sour-puss Presbyterians all about no fun and no freedom? We are about true fun and true freedom: these come only in Jesus Christ.
Purification, obedience, rejecting the world—none of that sounds like love; those all sound like different versions of the word No. God’s Word to us in Jesus Christ is Yes. Love is Yes, and love is No. The love of which God speaks is permanent and exclusive—committed. John talks about this love. Jesus talks about this love. We’re so confused about love, partly because the world has taught us that love has nothing to do with purity or obedience, any more than real love is about permanence or exclusivity. Show me, the world shouts, love that is permanent and exclusive, love that has to do with purity and obedience, and I will show you what does not exist on this earth—so says the world. What do we have to show in response, beloved? The Church. Christ. One another. Our imperfect though always aspiring discipleship.
In our imperfection, we like the message about love simpler and more direct, like John gives it to us in this third chapter: “For this is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another” (3:11). There it is. The end. Done. I’ll just sit down now. John has been telling us what this love looks like that the faithful have and do for one another. None of it has sounded too exciting: not much fun. The world’s version sounds better. It suits us better: love is a matter of intensity, of desires—our own desires; love is a matter of emotional fulfillment, my fulfillment: feed Me, fulfill Me, satisfy Me. You know, love.
What does Jesus show us about love? Is the cross about love? The world says no; the world in the church says no. John, most mystical of the apostles, is always speaking of Jesus and love in the same breath. Not long before he goes to the cross, Jesus kneels and washes the feet of his disciples. Can you imagine? This was a most menial task, humble, lowly, a task of service, for servants—those of no standing, rank, or respect, what the little lackeys did. Love looks like getting down in the dust to wash away some of the dust of the journey from our brothers and sisters, wash them in the name of Christ, with the hands of Christ, by the love of Christ. This is what people who have passed from death to life do.
They’ll know we are Christians by our love. Do we know the love by which they will know us? William Barclay reminds us that “the Christian life is the imitation of Christ.”[1] Who is Christ? Love, of course! There it is. The end. Done. I’ll just sit down now. Only, what does this love look like, because love looks like something. Christ shows us love is faithfulness, purity, and obedience. To imitate Christ is to live God’s Word, obediently, faithfully, lovingly, rejecting the world and its damning, destroying ways. I imagine several of you have been on the receiving end of love without faithfulness. How did you like it? Christians can’t just claim love, let alone say love, and be done, as though to say the word or to have certain feelings about the word were enough. Church, let us live this Christ-love that has claimed us, lest we live a lie.
One of the songs Becky Gaconnet found for our children to sing reminded us that the church is a people: we are the church together. The Church is a shared experience of the love of God; the Church is sharing the experience of God’s love. If we would know God’s love, let us be the Church. In the Church, as the Church, we can have this experience, daily.
John reminds us of Cain. Who? Why? The earliest chapters of Genesis record two profoundly consequential human acts: disobedience and murder. The very opposite of love. Isn’t John being a bit extreme, raising Cain? Oh, we’re accused now of being hateful haters, and we just hate that, but murderers? But what does John say? “Do not be like Cain, who belonged to the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own actions were evil and his brother’s were righteous” (3:12). Cain could not abide his brother’s righteousness: it just drove him nuts. John is warning us not to be as those who loathe the righteous. Was Abel self-righteous? Hardly! Cain was the self-righteous one. Beloved, self-righteousness does not love righteousness. Self-righteousness loves self. Those who love self have room for only one permanent, exclusive love. We are not naturally inclined to love the pursuit of righteousness, any more than we are naturally inclined to love God. We are inclined to call righteousness whatever promises fulfillment of our self-love.
Barclay reminds us, “Jesus said that the old law forbade murder but the new law declared that anger and bitterness and contempt were just as serious sins [Mt 5:21-22].”[2] How many murders have been committed from anger? From bitterness? From contempt? We know anger, bitterness, and contempt are not the way to life. We may not have paused to consider that they are most certainly the way to death.
Probably, Christians have never been generally loved by society—we’re a rather inconvenient bunch when we live up to our faith in imitation of our Lord. Cain hated Abel the way a bad man hates a good man. “[T]he good man is a walking rebuke to the evil man [. . .] his life passes a silent judgment.”[3] Even if we never say an even vaguely critical word to or about another person, our lives as faithful, obedient Christians pass “silent judgment” on anyone and everything that is anti-Christ, actively or passively. No wonder John writes, from the scars of wisdom and experience, “Do not be surprised, my brothers and sisters, if the world hates you.” (3:13). The world recognizes you for what and whose you are! John Stott observes that “It is not just hatred, but hatred of Christian people, which reveals the world in its true colours.”[4] When the government goes after Christians, when the courts rule against Christians, when teachers go after Christians—well, a certain sort of Christian—we see the world as it is. It’s when the powers don’t hate you that the true trouble begins. If they don’t hate you—reject, complain, exclude, condemn, cancel—either they haven’t recognized you or they’ve already brought you over. You’re not a threat to their power. We hate to be hated. We’ve found that, when we go over to the world, we aren’t hated so much, and that’s a relief. We all like to be liked, or at least not singled out for ridicule.
They may know we’re Christians by our love—I’m not as sure as I once was about that. We’re so confused about love. John tells us, “We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love each other. Anyone who does not love remains in death” (3:14). Our fellowship love, our koinonia in Spirit and truth, purifying, obedient to the Word of God, is assuring, encouraging evidence that we aren’t living in or for death’s camp, anymore; we aren’t living for ourselves, aren’t worshipping at the altar of self-fulfillment. We have passed from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light. God is alive in us, now—we can know it, feel it, as we walk in faithfulness, as we seek purity and meditate upon the purification the Spirit is working in us, together. We rejoice in all this as we express all this together and share all this with one another, and with those presently outside our fellowship. Beloved, let’s bring them in!
We don’t get it right all the time. We listen to voices that call us off the way. We are always being called off the way, to bypaths that seem as if they could be right: in the end they all lead into deep darkness. Falsehood and darkness lead to death. If you knew you were being led to death, you wouldn’t go that way, so these ways are dressed so as not to look deadly. They look like light, like love. We’ve become so confused about love. How to tell false from true?
Christ love for one another—true love—is how we begin to tell false from true. “Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him” (3:15). Hate, murder—what is John after? Why would this need saying? Beloved, some hate is obvious, other sorts of hate are not: anger, bitterness, contempt. We’re accused of these. Though we hope they’re wrong, we can get to a point when we fear that those who accuse us might be right. I think John has those accusers in view, especially those who have departed the fellowship, no matter what they call themselves. What of their anger, bitterness, and contempt? Those who heed the call of the world, in the church and beyond, must see those who abide as the wrong ones, the bad ones. Against everything in him except his faith, Abraham obeyed the command to sacrifice Isaac. Wrong! Bad! When we refuse to sacrifice something we’ve told ourselves we cannot live without, convinced ourselves we would cease to be who we are, without, how are we living our faith? What would you refuse to let God have? You know there’s something. Even Abraham didn’t say yes right away. If God demanded that you sacrifice it, how would that be loving of Him? We affirm God is love, but what has He sacrificed? And what’s love got to do with sacrifice, anyway?
This hate for the brothers and sisters about which John writes seems to be coming from those who pursue fulfilment in the world, and that is to love darkness. They feel anger, bitterness, and contempt for those who abide. It’s not that the bitter ones refuse to strive for righteousness and purity—no, they have simply revised the definitions of those words. Progress is in the definition of words.
Beloved, progress is in The Word. The un-Christian ones, we are told, are those who don’t go the new way by the new light. We who abide evoke nothing but confusion, pity, aversion, and, ultimately, passionate dislike among those who walk and see by the new light.
“This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters” (3:16). Laying down his life doesn’t mean only that he went to the cross for us. Beloved, Christ has always been. When Emmanuel came among us, for us, in a mysterious sense he laid down aspects of his divine life, though Jesus was always fully divine and fully human. Christ completely, willingly humbled himself for us, kneeling to wash the feet even of the one who would betray him, willingly going to the cross for those who had abandoned him the day before. For us under Christ, to lay down our lives at the very least means to place ourselves under the obedience of Word, Spirit, and Truth. When I lay down my life, in imitation of my Lord, Christ lifts up my life, saying “Rise!” If I never lay down my life, if my life is what I’m uplifting—feed Me, fulfill Me, satisfy Me—humbling myself for anyone becomes intolerable injustice.
Love is to lay down our life, together under Christ, to sacrifice our own way. Let us be willing to sacrifice our own way for God, certainly! Let us also be willing to sacrifice our own way for one another, mutually. In that sacrifice we receive and walk in God’s way, Jesus Christ. Rather than life as the cultivation of My Will, let life be among us and in us for the cultivation of Thy Will.
To the God of all grace, who calls you to share God’s eternal glory in union with Christ, be the power forever!
[1] William Barclay. Letters of John and Jude. Daily Study Bible. Philadelphia: Westminster P, 1975. 83.
[4] J. R. W. Stott. Epistles of John. Tyndale NT Commentaries. London: Tyndale, 1964. 141.
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