Isaiah 25:6-9; Psalm 121; Romans 6:3-11; John 19:16b-40
Last night we heard Jesus say, “Just as I have loved you, you also should love another,” and we were reminded that it is God’s love for us, embodied in Jesus, that enables us to love others. We saw that fear can cause us to forget God’s love for us, and we heard that the most Christian act in times of fear is to remember God’s love for us and, out of that love, to choose to love others.
This morning we are confronted with the reality that choosing to love has consequences. It’s important to be honest about this. Love is hard. Real love, true love, the kind of love that lifts up the loved one, love that gives life––this love has a cost. Mothers in particular know this, as does anyone who has ever cared for and nurtured a living being: a family member or a friend, a student or even a pet. Choosing to love another so that your love gives them life is choosing to accept the pain and suffering that often accompanies such love. The pain of making space within our lives and within our hearts for them, the suffering that comes from thinking about their suffering and eventual death, the difficulty of doing what’s best for them, especially when it’s not so good for us––these choices give life, they are made out of love, they make us better people, but they come with a cost.
But love is what we choose, because love is what we see Jesus choose, even though the cost was crucifixion. We are not here to praise his choice to die, we are here to praise his choice to love no matter what, and to commit to making that same choice. Because Jesus is not unique in his choice to accept death as the consequence of his commitment to love others. The world forced Jesus to choose between loving others or betraying them to save himself, and he chose love. He was not the first, nor is he the last, to make that choice, nor was he the first or the last to suffer death as a consequence. Many others, some inspired by him but not all, have made the same commitment and suffered the same consequence.
What we do see in Jesus, though, is his resurrection, “the first fruits of those who have died.” In Jesus, we see that death ceases to be a permanent consequence of love, as we heard in Isaiah, “the Lord will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death for ever.” We receive God’s assurance, God’s promise––and the fulfillment of that promise––that death is only a temporary detour on the road of love that gives life. In Christ, we see that the deadly consequences of love come to an end, and that the new life that comes from love endures.
After our hymn of the day, we will move into what are called the Bidding Prayers and the Solemn Reproaches. In these prayers and reproaches, we will call to mind the love that gives life to others. We will confess that we have not always chosen to live into that love. We will give thanks that, despite our failures, Jesus’ choice to love gives life to us, too. And we will call the cross life-giving because we know that God has turned it from a symbol of the power of death to a symbol of the power of love.
Love gives new life, and so we can choose, again and again and again, to love as God calls us to, to love so that others have life, accepting for ourselves the consequences of pain and suffering and even death. We can take on the difficult work of choosing to follow Christ in the way of love, even when it leads to a cross, because we know that this is not the end. We know that “since we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” We know that loving one another as Jesus has loved us means––in the end––life for all. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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