I wonder what it was like to sit there with Jesus and listen to him speak at great length about his relationship with his Father, and how that same relationship was granted the disciples. The intimacy and power of the words coming from him must have been overwhelming and actually quite confusing.  The room must have been still and dark at times… that night before Jesus would be executed.

Jesus said to his disciples:
“This is my commandment: love one another as I love you.
No one has greater love than this,
to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
You are my friends if you do what I command you.
I no longer call you slaves,
because a slave does not know what his master is doing.
I have called you friends,
because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.
It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you
and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain,
so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you.
This I command you: love one another.” (JN 15: 12-17)

I wonder if they could grasp in any way the depth of the experience of life that Jesus was trying to convey. For the disciples, I imagine it was a bewildering, perhaps even despairing experience in some ways.  How could it all have come to this?   All the miracles, and the hope for a new kingdom that would address the Roman occupation and the marginalization of the Jewish people…how does what Jesus was telling them now have anything to do with these pressing issues?  What is all this talk about laying down one’s life, being a friend and not a slave, and loving one another?

Indeed, there are some baffling statements that Jesus is making. He starts out by giving them the great commandment of love that includes ultimately the greatest act of love, which is to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.  Then he seems to qualify what he means by friends – “if you do what I command you.”  He then says that he no longer calls them slaves because a slave does not know what his master is doing.  Substituting ‘friend’ for ‘slave,’ he qualifies what he means by ‘friends’ again by saying ‘I have told you everything I have heard from my father.’

It seems to be the quality of sharing that constitutes the conveyance of friendship. This friendship is not something that a slave would experience or even have access, given the marginalized position held by the slave.  A current framework for looking at this may interpret to ‘not know’ what the master is doing as to know exactly what the master is doing  – the master is doing everything that  is accorded the privileges of the master with no consideration at all for the slave.  There could be no trust, no friendship in such a debasing transactional relationship.

Note that the transformation from slave to friend comes through the vulnerability of Jesus to share everything he has ‘heard from the Father.’  There is no separation here.  Jesus is passing on in a radical way his own relationship in the Divine to his disciples.  Perhaps more to the point, he is trying to make the disciples aware that the gift of relationship with God that is at the core of his being, is also at the core of their being.  ‘It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you.’  So there cannot really be a choice at that deep level.  The divine spark is there and always has been there within us.  The choice only comes in whether or not the disciples (we) will accept this divine core relationship that creates and sustains us in every moment and allow it to radiate forth in our life.

Then comes the task of friendship, now repeating itself in the commandment to love one another. It is only by following LOVE – and the descent that it must take by giving over its own life – the fruit that will remain can be born.

Love goes down into death, or becomes death in the act of giving life. This giving of life in death is a gaining of life – and not just any life – it is NEW LIFE, MORE LIFE.  I wonder who knew, in the heavy dark air of that room where they were gathered, that Jesus was not only predicting or describing what his life has been about and where it was leading, but more importantly laying out the pattern of life and death for the disciples and indeed all of us.  The chiastic movement is:

• • Commandment to Love one another
    • Friends lay down their lives
      • No longer a slave
      • Slaves cannot access a relationship
    • Friends share everything that has been given
  • Commandment to Love – Bearing effective ‘fruit’

Life dies in love to give new life. Or put another way, if we follow the trajectory of the gospel passage, Love dies by giving its life away, which is simultaneously giving life a WAY to go further, to gather in more. Love begets more love by giving its life away.

Love is a commandment and an appointment, in the former because Love IS (there is no choice in the matter), in the latter because we can choose to BE in the flow of love or to deny it. When it is denied, slavery flows from enslavement.  We remain enslaved to a lie when we tell ourselves about who we are and then project that lie out onto everyone and everything else.  We then deny others because we will not accept the truth of ourselves.

The breaking point is when we realize that to be a friend means that we are obedient not to the master, but to the Friend!  This obedience is listening to Love itself and trusting its curious pattern that appoints us to bear fruit.  This is an appointment of descent that entails giving away what has been given to us, and mysteriously experiencing that we live even more fully in the very process of doing so.

There is an infinite freedom in love that is a friendship that we cannot fully grasp. I wonder if the disciples felt that freedom as Jesus spoke to them.  Did they have that sense of being bewildered, maybe anxious as well, but also strangely enlivened by the unknown possibilities of what this Life-Giving-Away-Love could possibly grow?  Perhaps, after Jesus’ death and resurrection following that night, they were able to intuit more of the echoes of this type of freedom.

The philosopher and mystic, Raimon Panikkar, speaks about this mysterious kind of freedom as a ‘purification of the heart,’ where the process is one of creation. “If we know where we are going, we are not really free.”[i]  To be free is to be Love’s friend and allow it to lead us wherever we must go.

I am amazed constantly at what else there is to give up or surrender in my own life, and even more so by the growing realization that there is nothing so powerful as practicing this engagement of surrender, which commands and appoints Love to go where it must and take us along – to create and re-create Love more and more.

[i] Raimon Panikkar, The Rhythm of Being: The Unbroken Trinity (Orbis: 2010), 35.

(posted May 24, 2019)