Simple Isn't Easy

Lonely Generation, by Echosmith

Propers: The Sixth Sunday of Easter, AD 2024 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

To say a thing is simple is not to say it’s easy. Lifting an engine block, for example, is a fairly straightforward process, yet it necessitates a great deal both of labor and of caution. Jesus’ commandment is simple: Trust in Me and love each other. “Love one another as I have first loved you.” Simplest thing in the world. Very hard to do.

Our readings this morning run the risk of coming across as insipid. Friendship and love, friendship and love, kumbaya. The sentiment is so anodyne, so tapioca plain, that no-one could really muster the nerve object. “Be a nice fella.” Yeah, sure, why not? Yet the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the Scriptures but in ourselves, that we misapprehend. Words like friendship and love ought to be radical, scandalous, shocking. Yet we struggle to hear them as such, for we have so long overused them, watered them down.

We tend today to treat friendship as some sort of casual thing. “Oh, yeah, we’re friends with them. Our kids go to the same school.” Not so in Jesus’ day, nor throughout the breadth of Western history. This is in part the result of democratization. The world of the Bible, and of every premodern society, is a world of hierarchy. There’s always someone above you, and always someone below you. This pertains even to the most intimate of relationships.

The bonds between parents and children, husband and wife, elder and younger siblings, simply were not equal. Someone was always in charge, who had the final say, and the rest just had to suck it up. Romans held a household ceremony for welcoming a new wife, and not for nothing, it was the same one that they used to welcome a new slave. The paterfamilias, head of the household, possessed absolute authority over everybody there, not just economically, but in terms of literal life and death. Grandpa could have you killed, so you best not miss his birthday.

The only exception to this—the only relationship that was not hierarchical—was friendship. Friendship alone was the bond of equals. A friend was someone who loved you, who knew you, neither as superior nor inferior but as you were, for whom you were. And that would often become the truest and most sacred relationship one could hold. Wives come and go, especially in Rome. Children grow up, move out, or die. But a friend—a friend was with you for life. A friend loved you, as an equal, by their choice.

This often shocks modern readers: how intimate, how smitten, were ancient peoples with their friends. And not just the ancients: read a few of Shakespeare’s sonnets; read a few of Lincoln’s letters. And modern people wonder, “Oh my gosh. Were they in love?” Well, maybe some of them were. But our forebears also understood friendship in ways to which today we are often blind. “Casual friendship” would have been a contradiction in terms. Their friends were typically closer to them than their parents or children or spouse.

So for Jesus to say to His disciples, 2000 years ago and half a world away, that “I have called you friends,” would have been an astounding admission, a bolt from the blue. To be apprenticed to a rabbi, to be formally called as a follower of a recognized religious authority—especially one in the running to be heralded as the Messiah—would have been the honor of a lifetime. That Jesus extended this honor to fishermen and to tax collectors was nothing short of shocking.

But no-one, no-one, would have dared to portray this as a relationship betwixt equals. Rabbi and disciple were as master and apprentice, as instructor and student. They weren’t friends. Who could be friends with the Christ, with the Messiah? Who would have the gall to consider himself His equal? Moreover, for John, Jesus Christ is God. Only two people in the whole of the Hebrew Scriptures are ever called friends of God: namely, Abraham and Moses, and the latter only indirectly.

Friends of Jesus. Friends of the Christ. Friends of God Almighty. This borders on the blasphemous. Yet Jesus says it’s true. And He says this, mind you, after the betrayal of Judas and before the denial of Peter. He’s proclaiming this to people who will leave Him. “I have called you friends,” He tells them. “No-one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” This is Jesus’ final discourse before His Crucifixion.

“You did not choose Me,” He continues, “but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last … I am giving you these commands so that you love one another.” Believe in Me and love each other as I have first loved you. Very simple. Not easy at all.

You’ve heard my spiel on love. You’ve heard it many times. It isn’t just about the way you force yourself to feel. To love, in the Bible, is to put the good of another before your own. Or perhaps more accurately I ought to say that it is to treat the good of another as your own. Jesus says to love others as we love ourselves; neither more nor less but as ourselves. Because ultimately all of us are one in Jesus Christ, one both in His Body and His Spirit. So all of us are part of one another. When good occurs to someone else that good occurs to me.

So, yeah, friendship and love to most of us sounds mealy-mouthed and boilerplate. But it is scandalous! And it is hard. It necessitates the killing of our ego, of who we think we are, so that we can rise again as Jesus Christ, each and every day. This is what made Christianity so shocking, so offensive, and so powerful in the earliest centuries of the Church: the fact that we loved one another; that we treated each other as equals, as friends; and that Christian communities shared their goods in common.

This was a threat to the Empire of Rome. We weren’t a military threat, mind you; they knew just how to deal with that. Rather, the Church was a spiritual threat, spitting in the face of decent, orderly, hierarchical Roman society. Well-bred Romans did not discuss crucifixion in public; that would be gauche. Yet here were we Christians, giving away our things, feeding the hungry, openly worshipping the disgusting spectacle of a Jewish revolutionary’s corpse upon a cross! Have we no shame?

And then—to call strangers our friends! Is nothing sacred? A Roman could easily understand cheating on one’s wife, beating one’s child, killing one’s slave. Such relationships were largely disposable. But to be promiscuous with friendship? Friendship was sacred. Friendship might be the only true and real love that powerful men might know. To tolerate a commune of self-proclaimed “friends,” putting the good of one another before their own advancement, in the midst of Roman cities— Who would even speak of such a thing? Stop now, you’ll just upset me.

That’s why they killed us, you realize. That’s why, for 300 years, the Roman state brought the hammer down on any Christian who got too uppity, too vocal, too prominent or popular. Because we challenged the foundations of society. People like us must be dealt with, before such insurrection gets too far, infecting even the Empire’s well-bred upper echelons. Churches were homes of radical inclusion: instantiations of the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth, where all are held as equals, as friends of God in Christ: “neither Greek nor Jew, male nor female, slave nor free.”

Things changed a lot, once the Empire converted. A lot of Christian ideology went mainstream: faith, hope, charity, equality, abolition, human rights and dignity, all good things. But the exchange went the other way as well. Often our communities of belonging became sources of exclusion in themselves. And then, alas, what became the point? True and worthy friendship, true and worthy love, remain just as scandalous and subversive today as ever they were in the past. And Christianity yet is as simple as it is hard: “Love one another, as I have first loved you.”

You, my friends, are the Resurrection and the life. You are the Body of Christ still at work within this world. Go forth, forgiving others as you have been forgiven. Go and show the world the freedom that is love.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout
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St Peter’s Lutheran
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Nidaros Lutheran
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