Psalm 33, Isaiah 45:11 – 19, 1 John 4:7-21, John 15:9-17
The Bible puts two things together that modern man would never in a million years put together. We see them both in the gospel and the epistle appointed for today.
On one hand there is something in both the gospel and the epistle which the World would claim is an Excellency beyond measure: love, in particular love for one another.
In the gospel passage, Jesus says things like this:
“As the Father loved Me, I also have loved you; abide in My love. 11 “These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full. 12 This is My commandment, that you love one another …
In John’s first general epistle, many of the same ideas are set forth, ideas which no doubt grace the insides of countless religious greeting cards:
7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 He who does not love does not know God, for God is love…18 There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear … 21 And this commandment we have from Him: that he who loves God must love his brother also.
So there we have it, love for one another. Surely of all the things one finds in the New Testament, this idea – that we should love one another – has common, comprehensive, unconditional approval by all humanity, everywhere, at all times, in all places. No person of good will, no one possessed of ordinary common sense, can possibly gainsay this. If this idea were ever pursued seriously by some critical mass of people, the results would very likely be world peace.
But in both the gospel and in the epistle appointed for today, we find something else, a creed, an insistence on a very narrow, very specific, very inflexible dogma concerning Jesus Christ. In the gospel, for example, Jesus says things like this:
10 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. … 14 You are My friends if you do whatever I command you.
And in the epistle, we find Jesus’ disciple John saying these things:
And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son as Savior of the world. 15 Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God.
Now this is what makes the Bible difficult for people, including a lot of Christians. The Bible not only contains ideas that almost no one could dispute, it ALSO contains ideas which almost everyone, except a tiny minority of faithful Christians, will INVARIABLY dispute. And what will get disputed by almost everyone are those parts of the Bible which insist that love of God and confession of a dogma – a specific confession of faith – that these two things are linked together inseparably. Earlier in his epistle, the Apostle John had written this:
And this is [God’s] commandment: that we should believe on the name of His Son Jesus Christ and love one another, as He gave us commandment.
In the view of modern men, none of this dogmatism is attractive. The dogmatic claims of the gospels or the epistles concerning Jesus are far from being self-evident. They pose great difficulties to the Christian when he attempts to argue and defend them. And, these claims are notoriously difficult to validate and verify by the standards that a modern man will accept. If you cannot put Jesus’ claims or the New Testament’s teaching under a microscope and produce them at will from a megatronic digitalized laser-guided nanomolecular magnetic truth-o-meter, then the modern man will scoff. The disciple of Christ proclaims the gospel through what Paul says is “the foolishness of preaching,” and here the modern man will readily and heartily agree with the Apostle Paul – it is sheer madness to accept something as true because some evangelist proclaims it to you! What’s worse, those who believe the dogmatic claims of Jesus and his disciples are so obviously prone to sectarian disputes, conflict and strife of all sorts, even religious wars.
What do Christians – serious and faithful Christians – think about all this? What do they do when Jesus himself links these two things together – love for one another and faith in Him, and not just in Him as some amorphous person, but faith in the Jesus who lives in the pages of the Bible itself, not in the fairyland of our sentimental ideas about him.
The temptation that presses itself most fiercely on serious Christians is to abandon one or the other of the two things which the Scriptures repeatedly link together. And, so, Christians can be found in all eras of the Church who have abandoned their love for the brethren in order to guard, protect, defend, and proclaim the dogma concerning Jesus. And, when this has happened, when Christians have let go the commandment to love the brethren, there has usually been a river of blood, or mounds of incinerated bodies, to be found in the wake of this abandonment.
We sophisticated folk usually view these conflicts as unbridled madness – the religious wars among Christians which still rage today in Ireland, for example – or the bloodshed which followed the Protestant Reformation, in which Catholics and Protestants happily and enthusiastically consigned one another to the flames, or the gallows, or the guillotine. One of the strongest circumstantial arguments one might put forth for the NECESSITY of PURGATORY is this: that such is place is required in order for Christians who have killed one another in religious zeal can spend whatever centuries are necessary to become reconciled to one another, before returning to the earth in the company of Christ to judge unbelievers.
Of course, there is another option for Christians who cannot hold love and dogma together. If they blanch at abandoning love for the brethren, then they may choose instead to abandon the dogma. This is, of course, the modern solution. And, so, we have communities of Christians who loftily proclaim that they have no creed by Christ, and – of course – this means that they have an allegiance to a name, since no further creed is ever allowed to intrude on the deliberately fuzzy and intentionally vague notion about who or what this Christ is and what he’s all about.
This kind of Christ, this modern Christ, we are told, has nothing to do with narrow-minded dogmatists that invoke his authority. On the contrary, Jesus – we are told – was comprehensively sympathetic. He affirmed people. Indeed, the only characters Jesus did NOT affirm –we are told -- were the dogmatic creeps who love to oppress slaves, women, gays, and other down-trodden sorts. If the world today is still far from universal peace and harmony, perhaps the major reason is that Christians themselves have grossly misunderstood the claims of Jesus about Himself.
If abandoning Jesus command to love one another leads to a wholesale destruction of human life, then abandoning the Bible’s dogma about Jesus leads to a wholesale destruction of human sanity. Instead of religious warfare, we get religious psychosis. Deny the Bible’s dogmatic statements about Jesus and you get two psychotic results.
First of all, you simply must reject the Jesus of the Bible. There has been no man on the face of the earth MORE dogmatic about Jesus than Jesus Himself. Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon put it this way: “… what adjective, besides ‘narrow,’ should be use to describe the statements ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life,’ and ‘No one comes to the Father except through me’ ?” Indeed. We could easily add others. “Before Abraham was, I AM.” Or, how about “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. 54 Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.”
Jesus’ apostles are no better. Peter says, [Acts 4:12] “12 Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” Or Paul, “
Or John [1 john 4:2-3] “2 By this you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, 3 and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God.”
I love this statement by John because it is just too too retro for today’s tastes. When speaking about Jesus’ humanity, in particular his human maleness, one often hears from the Bible’s egalitarian despisers that traditional Christians are trying to put God in a box. But, this is the very point that John is making about the incarnation – God is not just in a box, but a very particular and specific box, a human male body, born of a virgin named Mary, 2,000 years ago, on a very specific hamlet named Bethlehem. If that’s not God in a box, I don’t know what is. And the test of one’s fidelity to this God is what one believes about the box His Son came to inhabit.
So, there’s nothing for it as far as dogma is concerned. Jesus is full of dogma about Himself; and His disciples, the foundation of the Church, they’re all just as dogmatic as Jesus. And that brings us full circle, for within the dogma that Jesus proclaimed, to his disciples, and through them to us is this: that we should love one another, just as Jesus has loved us.
Admitted – this is very hard to do. And two millennia of Church history shows just how easy it has been to fall off the horse on one side or the other – to proclaim the dogma without the love of the brethren, or to attempt to love the brethren BY AVOIDING so far as possible the dogma which makes the Christian faith so unlovely in the eyes of the world.
I do not have time in a brief homily to expound completely how one keeps this balance. But, I would point to two things in Jesus’ words in our gospel for today that should put a long bar in our hands as we attempt to walk this tightrope.
First of all, love is a choice we may, usually toward those who are not lovely. Remember, the Paul says that when we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Jesus told his disciples: You did not choose me, but I chose you.” John, in today’s epistle, said it this way: “10 In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” If we are going to love one another the way Christ loved us, we are NOT going to look around for lovely Christians to love. We’re going to set our hearts on those Christians who are NOT lovely, those whom we do NOT feel are particularly nice, or helpful, or kind toward us.
The second thing I’d leave for you to ponder is this: the love of Christ was shown pre-eminently through his willingness to suffer for the sake of those whom he loved. Again, in today’s gospel, Jesus said “13 Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.”
Finally, I’d warn you about this: the dogmatic confession of truth about Jesus includes an allegiance to his commandment to love one another. In our day, “love one another” is almost invariably severed from the dogmatic confession about Jesus. In his May 19 review of the film The Da Vinci Code in the _National Review_, Robert Novak writes this:
“The professor Hanks plays makes plain that he believes that Jesus is only a man—a man and that’s all. A great moral teacher, perhaps, but only a man. That, of course, is the one thing that the Jesus himself does not allow us to believe. If Jesus is only a man, he is no great moral teacher. He is on the contrary a fraud, a pretender, a horrible spendthrift with his own life and the lives of his apostles—all twelve of whom met a martyrdom like his, some of them crucified, all of them most brutally killed without the utterance of a single recantation. If He was not the Son of God, one with the Father and the Holy Spirit, he was either a mountebank or a lunatic, and deserves our contempt, not our praise. His every moral teaching would be vitiated by its radical emptiness and fraudulence.”
May the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ strengthen us in the inner man to know and to confess the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about His Son Jesus in this perverse and wicked generation. And may the Spirit of Christ grant us to love those who have been purchased by his most precious blood, to the end that the world who sees us will know that God has sent his Son into the world.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
