John 15:9-17 The responsibility of choosing to love
6 Easter

One of the great luxuries of this country is the freedom of choice we have. Apart from the choice of all the products we have at our fingertips, we are also blessed with a tremendous choice of careers, places to live, places to worship, whom to love, causes to engage in, and the list go on and on. In most parts of the world, people are faced with just one choice or sometimes not even that. There are thousands of people all over the world who work in places they hate because there are no other jobs. People continue to struggle and live in dangerous war-torn places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sudan because they have no other choice. For most young people in the developing world, marriage is not a matter of falling in love and having the freedom to marry or not to marry the person you are involved with. Marriages are arranged by parents and other adults for their children often without any input from the people to be married. And there are many places in the world where one can be killed for converting to another religion.

We never think too much about it, and in fact take our freedom of choice in almost all areas of our life for granted. But the fact that we can so easily talk about “loving” something or someone is precisely because of the freedom of choice we enjoy here. Having this freedom means that we can ignore anything we don’t necessarily like and zero in on that one thing we absolutely love. I agree that not everything in life is exactly what we love, but we still have much more choices and freedom to pursue what we love in life.

I have a friend who is brilliant in what he does. As soon as he graduated from Cornell he got hired by one of the big financial companies on Wall Street. By the third year of his employment he had paid off all his student loans and he had bought the Mercedes Benz for his father that he had promised to buy. But he was not happy with what he was doing. He wanted to do something more meaningful, so he left his job at Wall Street 6 years ago. He now works for a non-profit organization to raise money for HIV/AIDS in Africa, which he absolutely loves. In this environment of such varied choices, I am sure we all understand what it means to love what we have chosen. It is our personal responsibility to love what we have chosen, because we know that nobody has forced it upon us.

Jesus says to his disciples, “You did not choose me but I chose you.” In other words, from amongst the millions of people he has chosen to love you and me. We are all here in this sanctuary to worship God, not so much because we want to, but because God chose to love us and bring us to Him. And just as we are responsible for what we choose in life, Jesus is responsible for us. And it is out of his sense of deep responsibility to us that he commands us to love one another as He has loved each one of us. That same sense of personal responsibility for what he chose to love is what led Jesus to say that no one has greater love than this, than to lay down one's life for one's friends. We are not just some random people that happen to be called Christians. Jesus knew that in calling and choosing his disciples he was also ready to die for them because he loved them so much. Responsibility calls for a lot of care not only for the present but also for the future. Wise choices are always made on the basis of how much we would like to invest ourselves in that particular thing. If we don’t want to spend time and effort in something, we will probably not hang on to that something or someone. And if we do want to spend time and effort on something or someone, it is most likely we do it out of love.

The best and purest of love involves a desire for our loved ones to grow and prosper in every area. This desire for our loved ones to grow and prosper is what Jesus demonstrates when he says to his closest disciples, “and I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another." The love that Jesus has for us, his disciples, is not a love that gets exchanged between just Jesus and the disciples. He wants us to grow in abundant love, a love that is so generous that it can be extended to many others.

In the Gospels there are many saying and parables of Jesus, narratives about how he interacted with people and miracles he did. It is interesting to note that in all the teachings of Jesus there is not that many, which can qualify as “commands.” The only instances of Jesus commanding happens when he commands the evil spirit to come out of the demon possessed person, and the other place is where he commands his disciples to love one another. Jesus says, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” So the commandment to love is really the only straightforward command that Jesus gives his disciples. This love that He commands us to practice with each other and others is to be modeled along the same love that he has shown us, like he says “as I have loved you.” And we know that the love of Jesus for us comes from a deep sense of responsibility and commitment for our growth and our salvation. It is a love that is overwhelmingly guided by service, action, self-sacrifice, healing and hope. If we have chosen to receive and embrace the love that Jesus has shown us, we also have a personal responsibility to see that godly love grow and flourish in the places we happen to be, amongst the people we happen live with. 

Look around yourself today, see whom you have chosen to live and interact with. Ask yourselves if you have taken on that personal responsibility to love that person or persons with the same kind of self-sacrificial love that Jesus has shown us. Ask yourselves if you have loved enough to allow the other person to grow and bear fruit, as they are capable of. Ask yourself and the people you have chosen to love if your love brings them joy and hope. Jesus has given us the command to love each other so that we can be filled with the joy of those who are loved without conditions. May God’s love and joy abide in us all. Amen.