John 15:5
“No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.” (John 15:15)
Josh was furious about his Christmas gift. It wouldn’t work right. Suddenly he threw it across the room to crash through a valued lamp shade. Josh was only three and in the ensuing years he tried, with varying degrees of success, to bridle that temper. We became good friends. An unlikely friendship. He was very small and our conversations did not rise to great heights. He didn’t always agree with me. Sometimes he would use creative epithets like, “You left your brains in Africa!” We would go to the amusement park together but we wouldn’t stay together. He would never deign to ride on the tame rides and I soon got ill on his favorites. When we returned from the circus he announced to his embarrassed mother that the best act was the elephant poop.
Josh taught me something about God and me. Now there is an unlikely friendship! Our conversations don’t exactly reach the heights- at least mine don’t reach very far toward his heights. Sometimes I may get angry with a gift he gives, say a bad thing, do a foolish thing, enjoy something ugly, but still he calls me, “friend.”
It is hardly remarkable that we should love one so ineffably loveable as God. But that he should love such a person as I – that strains the imagination. And yet Jesus calls us friends (Jn 15.15). Strange that God should love us in such a one-sided relationship. But that we should love him – how could we not! And yet…and yet, how feeble and passionless my love for him. The one who has no good reason to love, loves passionately; the one who ought to love much, languishes in feeble and passionless responses.
A paradox, but not a mystery, for the quality of love depends on the character of the lover, not on the merits of the one loved. Against the backdrop of this lop-sided love affair, Jesus calls us friends. Not slaves or even children, both of which we are. But friends! He gives us an incredible invitation. He invites us to a relationship so intimate it can only be described as he being in us and we being in him (John 15:5).
Let us turn to the affectional part of abiding: to be in love (vs 9-17). This passage highlights three aspects of that love relationship: choices, communication, companionship.
Choices. I did not choose him to begin with, he chose me (vs 16). To be chosen by some beggar I may have befriended is one thing, but to be chosen by the Lord of the universe whose love I ignored! And not chosen merely to have the judgment against me revoked and receive assignment to some distant island of paradise, but chosen for companionship in a love relationship, more intimate and abiding than marriage. That is not easily believed. It points up an important thing about love. True love, as we have seen, depends on the nature of the one loving rather than on the loveability of the one loved.
God’s character is so loving you might almost equate him with love: “God is love” (I Jn 4.8,16). God did not invent love as a moral hoop through which his creatures are enticed or driven to jump. No, God is love. From infinity past the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have been bound together in bonds of living love. He just is that way. And from the overflow of that love he created a being, designed on the model of his own nature, that could receive his love and respond in love. A risky plan. What if that created being chose not to respond in love, to walk away from his love or even to reject it? Which is what that being chose to do. And every son and daughter of Adam since has followed that incredible path. But God didn’t change in nature, so he reached out to reclaim the ones who chose to fall out of love.
God chose us (vs 16). Then he calls on us to choose, too. Thus love is more verb than noun- first of all what I choose, not how I feel. Notice that obedience and love are used almost interchangeably in the passage: “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain in his love…You are my friends if you do what I command” (vs 9,10,14). The contemporary mood is to stress love and neglect obedience, but that won’t work.
Love is demonstrated by the choices it makes. Choosing to act in behalf of another is to love; without action there is no genuine love. But volitional love in itself is not full love. Note that love begins with a choice. And the ultimate evidence of love is its choice to make a sacrifice: “Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends” (vs 13). Without sacrifice, love may be genuine, but there is no proof of it. One could act kindly or generously toward another for the benefit he himself gets from the relationship. So it is sacrifice that proves other-love rather than self-love is supreme. And the strongest love is proved by the greatest sacrifice, life itself.
We are chosen for companionship with the best of friends. So one strand in the three-fold bond of love is choice. His choice of us as his friend and our choice of him as our Lord.
Josh has been my friend now, for several years. He is especially hard to resist when a smile breaks across that pixie face as he offers a gift of atonement, some well-loved toy, hugs me tight and says, “Sorry, Pawpaw.” Recently Josh moved to a distant city and entered first grade. The other day I received a letter, the first from my buddy while we learn to communicate and companion…