Poolesville Presbyterian Church
05.13.12; Rev. David Williams
It was the first day of school, and I had been assigned a friend. The year was 1978, and I was going into fourth grade, and the school was the American School in London.
The ASL is a private school for the spawn of expats and diplomats and American businessfolks, inhabiting a large and mostly windowless cement and brick modernist building in the posh district of St. John’s Wood.
Like the base schools that serve military munchkins, it was a constant churn of faces. Every single year, the classes were different, as their globetrotting parents were reassigned or moved to another business office. So every single year, a substantial percentage of the class would be replaced with new faces. If you showed up mid-year, as I did and so many kids did, those first few days were like walking into that school stress dream. You didn’t know where you were, who anyone was, and what you were supposed to be doing.
If you were one of those helpless new faces, for the first couple of weeks you got a teacher-assigned “friend,” whose job it was to help show you the ropes.
My assigned friend clearly enjoyed his role. He explained where everything was. He told me where I needed to put my stuff. He told me where I was supposed to sit. He told me how the bell system worked, and how to get to the buses through the great windowless warren of a building. I ate lunch with him in the lower school lunchroom, and he told me what food was good and what meals I wouldn’t want to eat. I heard a great deal about how many toys he had, and how rich he was. He had many toys, all of which were better and far more interesting than my toys, which weren’t worth talking about.
When the time came to run around on the patch of modernist asphalt and concrete that passed for the playground, he told me who I should want to hang out with. That turned out to be pretty much just him. He told me how I shouldn’t play with one kid because he was stupid, and how I should stay away from this other kid because he was obnoxious, and how every single one of the girls was dumb. “All of them?” “Yes, all of them.” I decided I wasn’t quite so sure about my assigned friend.
Then he decided we should play a war game, in which he would pretend to be Ultraman, a giant Japanese hero robot space warrior, and I would pretend to be the monster that Ultraman defeated. I’d seen Ultraman...it was a fourth grade favorite...but I just couldn’t get my “soon to be defeated monster” right. No, I needed to stand over there. No, that “roaring monster” sound I was making wasn’t right, it needed to be different. No, you can’t hold your hand that way when you pretend to blast me with your alien attack, it’s insulting in some cultures, but of course you wouldn’t know that, because you wasn’t the world traveller. It was a really quite not-fun way to spend recess.
On the bus on the way home that day, I decided that perhaps that friend assignment was only going to be a one-day assignment. Being ordered around is not anyone’s idea of a friendship.
And then, as we drift in and out of the lectionary reading this morning, we hear Jesus saying “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” What? Huh? You’re my friends...if you obey? How is that friendship?
If we just hear that verse, in isolation from every other verse this section of John’s Gospel, then we might take it that way. But separating out a verse from context is never an appropriate way to read the Bible. That’s generally true, but it’s particularly true here in the fifteenth chapter of John. Chapter fourteen through seventeen are all part of one long teaching in John, what Bible scholars call the “Farewell Discourse.”
Unlike the three other Gospels, the fourth Gospel is not set up like a travelogue. Mark, Matthew, and Luke lay out an arc beginning with Jesus in Galilee and traveling down towards Jerusalem, with the physical movement towards the sacred city framing the narrative.
The structure of John’s Gospel is intentionally different. What is important to John is telling the story of a series of seven signs. Those signs, or semeion, are holy events, moments of miracle and meaning that speak to something beyond themselves. In telling us their story, John is laying out not a movement through space, but a moving into deeper meaning.
Each of those events reinforces the character and nature of Jesus. There’s the miracle at Cana in John 2:1-11, where Jesus turns water into a nice piquant cabernet, with just a hint of oak, peat, and elderberry. There’s the healing of the child of a royal official in chapter 4, and an indigent lame beggar in chapter 5. Five thousand folks are fed in chapter six, despite the fact that the disciples hadn’t arranged for a caterer. In chapter nine, a blind man is healed. Finally, the seventh sign comes in John 11, as Jesus raises Lazarus.
With the completion of this set of signs, John’s story of Jesus begins to come to a close. But before it does, John needs to complete the telling. And so we get the Farewell Discourse, in which Jesus describes who he is, promises that God will provide the disciples with the Holy Spirit. It’s a collection of sayings, complex and interwoven and blended up together, as is so much of John’s Gospel.
That blending poses something of a challenge conceptually in today’s passage, one that surfaces as we consider the peculiar internal tension between loving and command. It’s not just that Jesus is telling us that we need to love one another. It’s that in that whirling circling way that John’s Gospel has, Jesus seems to be demanding it. If you keep my commandments, you abide in my love. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.
The tension is this: can you demand love, and have it still be love? We know a friend who is assigned is not a friend. We know a friend whose friendship is contingent on you doing every last thing they say is not a friend. Is love that is commanded still love?
Anyone who’s every been through high school can confirm that giving someone a romantic note that tells them that you command them to love you doesn’t do anything ninety-nine point four percent of the time. And that other point-six percent of the time, it tends to result in a restraining order.
What Jesus is doing, though, is not just ordering people around. The commandment he is conveying is not an effort to control or manipulate. It is, instead, an “order” in the same way that a joyful life itself is “ordered.” Living into the love that Jesus requires is a part of any healthy human relationship. It is a command, but only in the way that a paramedic might whisper “breathe” into your ear during CPR. We are compelled to it, but only in the way that a mother is compelled to love her child, or a child is compelled to love their mother. It is an order, but only in the way that the laws of physics order the universe to make existence possible.
When Jesus offers up that command, he does so from the heart of who he is, recognizing that if our communities and our lives are ordered according to the Spirit that dwelled within him, then our freedom will not be diminished, but magnified.
So hear that command, and live into it. Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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