“Jesus loves me”
Mark 10.17-34
1 John 3.11-24
Preached Canberra Baptist Church Sunday 26th August 2007
How is faith ‘shared’? What is even the right word for describing the mysterious process by which a person becomes convinced of the reality and the presence and the loving intention of the one we call ‘God’? Is faith shared like a lovely gift, or caught like an accidental virus? Is it taught like a lesson we learn or savoured like a poem we love? Is it held in the mind as a great truth we have come to affirm or does like it lie in the heart and the emotions as an experience that actually holds us, that we cannot escape even if we tried?
We have been exploring questions like this. We’ve looked at some of the key content of faith in Jesus. We’ve explored the mystery of his death and resurrection. We have seen that faith can never be divorced from the call to discipleship and the ethical content of Jesus’ teaching and the kingdom of God he announced. In looking at the content of faith we examined the profound future dimension of Christian faith – that people of faith are always looking forward with hope, hope for both personal destiny, and for the world which is held in the creative intention of God’s loving purpose for all things.
A fortnight ago I turned to reflecting on what methods and approaches might help us in communicating this mystery of faith to others. There are many biblical injunctions that we should do this . We are called to be ‘fishers of people’, sent out as witnesses to all the world, asked to be ‘always ready to given an account of the hope which is in us’. So we have been looking to Jesus and how he did it as our model. We talked about valuing questions over trying to tell people things. We need to hear and take seriously people’s questions about life, God and Jesus. We need to honour and engage our own questions about the world in which we live and the faith that we hold, and the church that we are. We’ve encouraged each other to keep telling the story of faith, how the meaning of stories cannot ultimately be controlled – that the Spirit uses this indeterminacy to bring truth home to the hearers.
In the final one of these seven sermons we come to what I think is the final dimension of how faith is shared, communicated, given, imparted, transmitted, whatever words you will choose. Faith comes through love.
Jesus said that all the law and the prophets, the sum total of religion, is summed up in two commandments: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength, and love your neighbour as you love yourself. Love God. Love your neighbour. Love yourself. Love is the essence of faithfulness to God.
Karl Barth, one of the greatest theologians was asked towards the end of his life if he could summarise the message of his voluminous writing and lecturing. The man who perhaps more than any other had shaped Christian faith and faithfulness over the twentieth century, simply replied: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so”.
If the gospel message call be boiled down into any formula, for child or adult, Sunday School scholar or theology professor, it is this: Jesus loves me. Our preaching and singing, all our pastoral visiting is there simply to remind us that Jesus loves us all, and calls us to love each other. That’s our message to the world. If we want to share faith, if we want to model ourselves on Jesus, and do as he commanded: love one another.
But how do we do that? There has been so much preached about love and yet still the world is in a mess and the church is in a mess. We preach about love, and yet in some churches, children have been abused and perpetrators have been protected. We preach about love, and yet in many churches women still find themselves unable to exercise leadership or express their gifts. We preach about love, and yet in most churches homosexual people find themselves rejected and condemned. What does it mean to love? For most of us that is a life’s work, but this I know, that most people are drawn near to faith as a moth is to a flame when they sense and experience that the people of God are people of love. The church father Tertullian reported that the world looked at the early church and “See how they love each other!” This is one of the marks of the church.
Love is the work of a lifetime, and we all need to keep at it, but let us look at the story of the rich young man in Mark’s Gospel to help us in our own loving. I want to make just three points about it.
“Jesus, looking at him, loved him.” This story appears in Matthew, Mark and Luke, but only in Mark are given this intriguing detail: “Jesus, looking on him, loved him”. Sometimes it can be hard to love what is actually in front of your eyes. It is easier to love in the abstract, to love things or people that you don’t have to look at. In marriage, it’s amazing how long one can be in love with the romantic illusion of the other person in the marriage, rather than that person as they really are. In the church it can be hard to love people when we really get to know each other. That is why life in close communities can stay a little superficial. It’s hard to love people who do silly things, or have strange quirks in their personalities - in other words, people who are human. To really be able to see people as they are, and love them, is one of the great challenge and the distinctive mark of a Christian life. A Baptist minister once met someone who said to him, “Some of my best friends are Baptists”. “That’s nothing,” replied the minister, “Some of my best Baptists are friends!” Loving is not an abstract concept: “Jesus, looking at him, loved him.” That is what we must learn to do too. “Let us not love in thought or word, but in truth and deed.”
This business of both looking and loving has a corollary. We must include within our loving gaze those whom we have learned not to see. There are some we do not love, because we don’t really see them at all. When the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims was going on in the 1990’s a Christian friend was very, very distressed by the long lines of refugees at the borders, the video footage of men and women being rounded up and taken away, as we later discovered to be killed and to be raped. This person was aware of the world, had seen all sorts of wars and calamities in the past. Why was this one so upsetting? After weeks of living with this distress and praying through her reactions, my friend came to s realize that her distress was because these people were European in appearance, they were just like me! She had become accustomed to people of Asian or African appearance going through these experiences: her compassion and empathy with the Bosnian Muslims was actually a subtle form of racism. She had come to see suffering Asians and Africans as a little bit different. While she loved them and was concerned for them, at the core of her concern she didn’t actually look on them in quite the same way.
Our loving is often subtly influenced by the ordering of our sight. If we are going to truly love as Jesus loved, we need to try to discipline our seeing, to see people wherever they might be, as they truly are, and then in that clear and compassionate seeing, love them appropriately and fully.
The second thing we learn about loving in this story is that it is costly. Jesus looked on this man and loved him, and invited him into the new community of love that the disciples, with Jesus, were pioneering. The cost of entry was nothing less than everything this man owned. In the church we often forget this, that Jesus called people to leave everything else behind and follow him. The early church in Acts 2 & 4 was a community of shared property and radical renunciation. The church today is rarely such a community. Now is not the time to trace these developments and either defend or attack our current practice – except to say this: that the call to love is a call to sacrifice! We cannot love and expect it will cost us nothing. It will cost us emotional energy and time. It will cost us discomfort to look upon others as they are - in either their physical needs or their emotional demands – and feel that claim on our life resources.
How we respond to that claim is not easy to measure. Jesus spoke of a poor widow who, with a couple of copper coins, put far more into the treasury than all of the larger offerings of the rich, but most of us are not poor widows. How we approach the matter of giving to others – to the church, to the worthy organizations around us, to the people in our fellowship and on our doorstep who have need – is the measure of our loving.
As a young man I was affronted when I went to some marriage preparation classes. Session number 1 was about budgeting! How can you talk budgets on the eve of this great adventure of total commitment and grand passion? I was a hopeless romantic. I now know we can’t talk about love at all without many forms of budgeting – weighing up what is forgone and surrendered, and how much is gained. On both sides of the ledger it is far more than we ever imagined:
Love is not the sweet thing that we knew so early,
When we clung in one another’s arms,
Love is but the serving of a servant lowly
That’s when you know – that’s when you know, that love is hard!
In any marriage, in any family, there are many sets of accounts. There is a rich and mysterious balance sheet that presents columns of unexpected emotional red-ink, and the surprising rivers of black ink that flow through to the bottom line. And there are the more mundane accounts as well, the mortgage to be paid, the kids to be educated, the groceries to be purchased.
And for the people of God love has its cost. This little business of “the offering”, why does it come at the end of the service? It’s there for a theological reason, a spiritual reason. We re-enact this story of the rich young man every week when we come to church. We commence and in the call to worship and early prayer we ask ‘what do we have to do to really live?’ Then in the prayers of intercession and announcements and the sharing with each other we tell God and each other how we’ve been living and what we’ve been doing since our youth. In it all Jesus looks on us and loves us. In the readings and preaching we believe Jesus speaks to us and encourages and challenges us. And then in the offering comes the response, the high point, the great dramatic climax: will you give away something of yourself, materially and emotionally and spiritually? Beneath the playing of the organ or the flutes the greatest drama in the world is being played out, as hearts either turn away from love, or offer a token, or really respond with commitment and change. That three minutes is the culmination of the service, the quiet time of response and resolution when we ‘dig deep’ into our pockets as much as our hearts and respond in love. Loving in truth and in action is costly. Do we turn away, sorrowful or respond in joy and set out upon the journey of loving?
Finally, loving transforms the world. As the disciples express their astonishment that anyone can enter the Kingdom of God, that riches and our entanglement with riches does not bar the kingdom to us all, Jesus offers a promise. He promises that the way of sacrificial love leads to great blessing, now and in the world to come. This is not some kind of prosperity gospel transaction that sacrifice today further enriches us tomorrow. What Jesus says is what we give away actually creates a new reality – a shared community of brothers and sisters, a shared network of resources for life and mission. The mark of our loving is sharing, and that sharing gives rise to new community of mutual care and aid, a community focused not just on its own life but on those outside – the naked and poor, the prisoners and the detained, the sick and the dying, as well as those others who also need God, the rich and the young and the rulers who are feted as celebrities in our society.
How do we serve Jesus and proclaim his message? Love one another! Love not in theory. Love not ideal pictures of what your Christian sisters and brothers are like. Dare to look on one another, in all our wounded quirkiness, and love. Love one another! Learn to look on those whom love normally excludes, those beyond the peripheral vision of a self-obsessed culture. Love the outsider. Love your enemies. Love not in thought and word but in truth and deed. Let love have a bottom line in your accounts, so that you can see the shape of it in energy expended, time spent, burdens carried for others that you can put size and weight to, dollars cast into the offering plate like bread upon the water or pressed into the hand of someone needs it.
Why do any of that? Because like that young man who had so much but lacked one thing, Jesus has looked on us and loved us. Somewhere along life’s journey, whether we were living out self-righteous social conformity or wild rebellion, whether we were prodigal sons and wayward daughters or the moralizing rigid children who never left home, Jesus has seen us as we are and loved us anyway. And that love has become the foundation of our lives – the most precious and meaningful and sustaining experience that we think a human being can have.
As we live the life of faith and try to communicate it: