Greater Love
Greater Love
John 15:12-13
When Tracy first took her job at the First Presbyterian Church in Lake Forest, we moved into a very small house in the middle of the parking lot area next to the church. The house had two rooms downstairs, two rooms upstairs and a bathroom. We thought it was the most amazing home ever! The house also had a detached greenhouse which came…believe it or not…with a master gardener. He and his wife had lived in the same house we were in as the “servants” of the folks who lived in the adjacent mansion. He was retired but still gardening.
In addition to being an incredibly wise gardener, John was also a very nice man. As soon as I showed an ounce of interest, he offered to share what he knew. Immediately, I was struck by the care with which he handled his plants. He would carefully examine them, checking the leaves and the stems for any clues on how the plant was doing. He might feed the plant a little differently. He might cut a branch off or trim a bud or two. He was seeing things that I couldn’t yet see and doing everything he could to keep those plants healthy.
John grew flowers. So, unlike a vegetable gardener, there wasn’t a meal at stake in his work. Instead, interestingly, this kind but very quiet man’s “measure” of his gardening success was simple beauty: geraniums that were bright red flowers and deep green leaves that looked like they would continue growing for a decade; other flowers of every shape and size and color that would form the pallet for the art that was his garden.
My personal highlight day was when I was out in my gardens, working away, doing my best imitation of John—planting and pruning and dead heading. That day, a member of the church walked up to me. (Because I wasn’t very known in the church, people often assumed that I was, in fact, a hired gardener.) Anyway, this member knew who I was. I knew who she was—one of the master gardeners of the local gardening club. She walked up to me and told me, “I think you’ve created a perfect English cottage garden! Good work!” I really felt like that was one of the nicest compliments ever.
Gardening quickly was pushed to the side when Emma was born. Who has time to garden when you’re chasing a toddler, right? Still, the satisfaction of that experience stayed with me. I envisioned something. I planted. I nurtured. I watered and pruned. I transplanted and arranged. All of it was hands on and hands in the dirt. And, in the end, it led to something beautiful—a place that invited people to pause and find a little joy.
In the fifteenth chapter of John, Jesus is teaching the disciples. He begins by saying to them that God is the gardener—the one with the vision, the knowledge, the wisdom. “I am the vine,” says Jesus. The disciples, Jesus says, are the branches. Every branch grows out of the vine and is sustained by the vine. The job of those branches is to bear fruit. The gardener does what it takes to keep the whole vine healthy. Branches that don’t bear fruit are trimmed. Branches that bear fruit but could bear more are pruned. (Every good gardener knows that plants need to be shaped, that sometimes they need to be cut way back in order to get a fresh start.)
This image—the gardener, the vine, and the branches—is all about connection and growth. Everything is connected to everything else and together, everything grows. It’s also an interesting image for a tradition in which one of the central stories was of starting off in a garden (Eden) and being thrown out of that garden as punishment. There is a restored harmony in this vision of a garden in which God and Jesus and his followers are all organically connected to one another.
The question though is, “What’s the fruit that we are to bear?” How will we know if we are growing in the ways we are supposed to grow? How can we be sure in challenging times that we are being pruned to bear even more fruit rather than cut off altogether. (Trust me here…a host of sermons have been preached in which the point is to threaten the folks in the pews with being “cut off.” Why not take a harmonious image and make it a source of fear, right?)
What fruit grows from a plant is pretty straightforward, right? You don’t plant peas and walk out to your garden and find carrots. You don’t plant roses and end up admiring your surprise cabbage. Plants bear the fruit that they are meant to bear from the start. There’s a “something” that they are meant to be, meant to offer to the world around them. Here’s something as useful as food or something is simple as a little does of beauty to make you pause. The rule is that everything should become even more of what it is.
I’ll push this image just a little farther. If God is the gardener—the master gardener—then I assume that God does what master gardeners do. They bring a variety of plants together and create harmonies in the variety. In a world in which we often shake our heads and wonder, “What can’t everyone just be like me,” what if God delights in a garden that includes an incredible diversity of “plants” and a broad harvest of fruit?
The real question, though, is, “What does it mean to bear fruit?” Jesus essentially says that what flows from the gardener to the vine and from the vine to every branch is love. If we want to be a part of the life of this vine, then love needs to flow through us, as well: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”
It’s interesting to pause there. Remember that in the other gospels, Jesus offers the “great commandment” in response to a hostile question: “Which is the greatest commandment?” What’s behind the question is an attempt to trip Jesus up, to have him say something that could be held against him. In John, the great commandment isn’t offered as part of some contentious discussion. Instead, the great commandment is offered as something that is organically built into us all: if God and Jesus and the people are all connected to one another then what flows between them is love and the fruit will be a particular moment when love comes to life.
I think about this as a parent. I want my kids to be loving people—not because I’m going to “get them” if they don’t; not because I’ll make them feel guilty or ashamed if they don’t. I want them to be loving people because that just who they have grown to be. I want them to be loving people, no matter where they find themselves, because that is just what they do. They may do a lot of different things and may know a lot of different people, but wherever they go, whoever they’re with, they will be loving people. They can’t help themselves. The joy rests in seeing them freely choosing to be loving people all on their own.
I think we all know what it feels like ourselves when we set aside all the other things we might choose to be and choose instead to just be a loving person. I’m not trying to manipulate anyone. I’m not trying to prove that I’m smarter or stronger or better looking or richer than anyone. I’m not trying to get what I want or get ahead. I’m just present and paying attention and open to the needs of the people and the world around me. Love is flowing through me and that love leads me to ask, “How can I help?” How can the love that has flown to me not flow through me?
It’s an incredible feeling in life to be doing something and realize, “Oh my God, this is what I was put on this earth to do!” The moment in which this feeling arises can be totally mundane: here I am helping a friend get to a doctor’s appointment; here I am pausing and playing with a child; here I am working hard to get a project done. Whatever it is that I am doing, the flow comes from who I am being when I am doing it. I’m not distracted. I’m present. I’m not frustrated or angry or resentful. I’m focused and dialed in. I’m not thinking about what I’d rather be doing. I simply care about what I am doing and how I am doing it and who I am doing it with. Implicit in this moment is the realization that God created me to care and to love and when I do, God’s nourishing life force flows through me and works of care and love are me bearing fruit.
That’s a huge moment—when we realize what we were put on this earth to do. Usually, it takes us a while to even articulate that feeling at all. When we do, we often think that whatever I was doing when I felt this “wholeness” is the only thing that I can be doing to feel this wholeness. It takes a long time to realize that I can be loving and caring and whole and be doing almost anything because what matters most is how I do it. Like a good fruit tree, we have to mature. We have to prune a few things that get in our way. We have to go through seasons in which bearing fruit is hard.
Ultimately, though, Jesus gives us a huge clue, even when we’ve “matured” about what the best fruit of all may be. He says, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Remember, this is Jesus before his arrest and death on a cross. Part of what he is saying is specific to what we all know has already happened: that Jesus would die for his friends, himself. In fact, there would be a time after Jesus death and resurrection when our earliest ancestors of faith would come to believe that being killed for your faith was the only high expression of love. So many people wanted to be martyrs that the early church leaders had to explicitly discourage this.
On Memorial Day weekend, it is possible to make a similar mistake. We remember the men and women who have laid down their lives in service to our country and we honor those breathtaking sacrifices. We should always do this! However, we also honor them by doing our best to create a world in which such sacrifices are not necessary.
To me, what Jesus is talking about is not just dying for your friends. I think he’s pointing us to self-sacrificing love in all forms. Here’s the loving spouse who, day in and day out, lovingly cares for their ill partner. Here’s the parent with the extra challenging child who lovingly works every day to figure out how to help that child grow. Here’s the person at work who lovingly makes their focus trying to bring the best out of their co-workers so that they can shine. Here’s the person who chooses to do the concrete work of loving and caring for the earth, picking up the trash that others seem so insistent on spreading wherever they go.
These are totally different moments. We could add a thousand more examples. What unites all those examples is that this self-sacrificing love is costly. We have to freely give our time and our energy and our resources. We know from the start that this is not about getting something back. We know that there will be people who consider us crazy for doing such things. However, what we know, more than anything is that this is what were put on this earth to do—to pay the price, to allow our hearts to be broken, to do whatever it takes to be a loving person, even in the most challenging moments.