Today we honor our moms. Not everybody can be a mom, but everyone at some time in their life has had a mom, and at that time our mom was the most important person in our world. Some of us had moms who made great sacrifices in our behalf. We are profoundly grateful for that. So today we honor our moms.
It’s not easy being a mom. Here are some examples of some mothers and things they could have said:
Mona Lisa’s mother: “After all that money your father and I spent on braces, Mona, that’s the biggest smile you can give us?”
Humpty Dumpty’s mother: “Humpty, if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred times not to sit on that wall. But would you listen to me? Noooo!”
Christopher Columbus’ mother: “I don’t care what you’ve discovered, Christopher. You still could have written!”
Michelangelo’s mother: “Mike, can’t you paint on walls like other children? Do you have any idea how hard it is to get that stuff off the ceiling?”
Napoleon’s mother: “All right, Napoleon. If you aren’t hiding your report card inside your jacket, then take your hand out of there and prove it!”
Jonah’s mother: “That’s a nice story, but now tell me where you’ve really been for the last three days.” (1)
It’s not easy being a mom. I always find it interesting whenever Mother’s Day falls on the Sunday when our lesson for the day is this one from John 15:
“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you . . .”
[You are mature enough in your faith to realize that God does not have a gender. God is Spirit. God is neither male nor female. This is one time when it would be most appropriate to substitute the word Mother for God rather than the word Father. In light of this special day, it makes so much sense to read our lesson like this: “As my Mother has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Mother’s commands and remain in her love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you . . .”
As William Makepeace Thackeray once said, “Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of children.”]
Let’s begin here: We love because God first loved us. That is the message for the day. In this passage, Jesus goes beyond the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule says what? . . . That’s right . . . “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.”
In this passage, Jesus trumps the Golden Rule. We are not simply to love our neighbor as we love our self; we are to love our neighbor as Jesus loves us. That’s a different and much more difficult standard.
You see, our own human love is always conditional, transient, and selective. Today we may love someone because he or she is simply lovable or perhaps because they act lovable toward us. But then we withdraw our love when we feel wronged or cheated. And, suddenly, love is replaced by a need for vengeance.
Just as damning, often we only love those people who are like us who share our background, our status, our values; who are talented and gifted and dress appropriately. Jesus’ love, on the other hand is for all people. And it is sacrificial.
A young lady was a writer for a magazine, and Valentine’s Day was approaching. Her editor asked her to write a poem for the magazine. “But before you do,” he said, “tell me what you think love is.”
She got starry eyed. “It’s looking upon a lily pond,” she said, “with the one closest to your heart, by the light of the moon, while the lilies are in full bloom.”
“Stop!” her editor said. “Let me tell you what love is. It’s getting out of a warm bed on a cold winter’s night and filling hot water bottles for sick children.” (2) That sounds like the voice of experience.
But her editor was right. Love is sacrificial, even though we may not feel we are sacrificing anything at the time. None of us, if we are healthy emotionally, love our children as we love ourselves. We love them far more than we love ourselves. The Golden Rule is insufficient for the relationship of a parent and a child. We love our children as Jesus loves them. Our love can never measure up to agape love, God’s love, of course, because we are mere mortals, but it does approximate that love. We love them far more than we love ourselves.
But here is the real test of Christian love: can we love all God’s children with a love that approximates the love we have for our own children? That is what Christ is asking us to do. Love others as he loves others. Wow! That’s hard.
One morning in 2012, a Winnipeg, Manitoba, city transit bus driver named Kris Doubledee, 38, made an unscheduled stop on a busy street corner. The passengers all watched him as he got off the bus and approached a man on the sidewalk who was barefoot.
Doubledee asked the man if he had any shoes; the man said no. So the bus driver removed his own shoes and handed them to the man. “Here,” he said. “You need these more than I do.” Then Doubledee returned to his seat wearing no shoes and continued on his route.
A passenger asked him why he’d done that. Doubledee explained that he’d seen the man standing there before and just couldn’t bear the thought that he didn’t have any shoes. (3)
Gee, we say, that’s the sort of thing Jesus would do. Yes, and that is the sort of thing a follower of Jesus might do. After two thousand years of Christian history, that shouldn’t be such a radical thought, but it is. We claim to follow Jesus, but we have very feebly sought to live as Jesus commanded us to live, and that is to love as he loves.
We see that kind of love sometimes in those who care for the aged and the dying. There was a beautiful story in Reader’s Digest recently. It was written by a woman in Rhode Island. She wrote that only three times in her whole life did she see her father cry.
The first time she saw him cry was when she was seven. His mother, her grandmother died.
The second time she saw him cry was at the airport when her brother departed for Vietnam.
The third time she saw her father cry was when he was in his 80s. Her mother, in late-stage Alzheimer’s, resided in a nursing home. Her father had visited her mother, his much-beloved wife, daily for ten years except for three months when he broke his foot.
After his foot healed, he returned to the nursing home. It seemed like such a long time since he had seen his beloved wife. He said, “I thought Mother forgot me, but when she saw me, she smiled and said, ‘I love you.’” Then, his daughter said, her father sobbed. (4)
Some of you understand those tears. We know a little bit of what it means to love as Jesus’ loved. We love those closest to us like that. The question is, can we enlarge that circle of love? That is what Christ is asking us to do.
Let me tell you about a dog that made the newspapers a while back. Some of you have dogs and know how special they can be. There was nothing special about this dog. He had no pedigree. He was just a mutt. But for some reason one day this dog stopped eating the food scraps that his master set out for him. Instead, he would take the bones, and anything else he could hold in his mouth, and disappear into the woods.
One day, being curious, the dog’s owner decided to follow him to see what he was doing. What he discovered was that his dog had been carrying food to another dog that had been trapped in some barbed wire. Nobody had trained him to do this. Why he should take this action, nobody knows, but he was taking his own food to a comrade in distress; denying himself in order to give another dog enough to eat. (5)
In my book, that dog is superior to most people. Maybe at some time or another he had slipped into a Sunday School class and heard the teachings of Jesus. For, even though he was just a mutt, he was living as Christ commands us to live.
Actually, Jesus gives us two commands in this passage. The first is to remain in his love. Where do we find the power to love as Jesus loved? We find it by remaining in his love. We read in verses 9 and 10: “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love.”
In verse 12 Jesus gives us that second command. It is that we are to “love each other as he has loved us.” This command is linked to the first which is to remain in God’s love. When we remain in God’s love, that love will motivate us and give us the power to love others.
Mark Buchanan, in his book Hidden In Plain Sight, tells about a time a number of years ago when he was struggling with his attitude toward a certain man. He says he fed his resentment and bitterness to the point where at times he hated this person.
One day, when he was thinking nasty thoughts about this man, he heard his son come in the basement, slam the door, go to his room, and start crying. Buchanan went to his son and asked what was wrong. It seems his son had been playing goalie in a game of road hockey with some school friends, and he’d let the other team score a rash of goals. His teammates started taunting him, mocking him, telling him he was useless, telling him to go home. They’d stand a better chance with an empty net than with him guarding the net, they said.
This is not something a father wants to hear. Mark Buchanan says he was furious. He was enraged. He started putting on his shoes to march down the road, call those boys to account, give them all a hard drubbing with his tongue.
It was then he heard an inner voice. “Mark,” God said, “where are you going?”
“To straighten this matter out, Lord,” Mark answered. “No one treats my son that way.”
“You have a father’s heart,” God said.
“Yes!” Mark replied.
“You hate it when someone hurts one of your children.”
“Yes!” Mark said again.
“I hate that, too,” God said.
And, at that moment, Mark Buchanan says he understood in the most visceral way, and for the very first time, that he could not claim to love God and hate his brother. “If I love God,” Mark Buchanan writes, “I’ll love what [God] loves. I’ll love [God’s] children, all of them . . . Or else, break [God’s] heart.” (6)
Think about that for a moment. It makes you angry when someone threatens to hurt one of your children. Do you feel that same anger when children are hurt . . . any place in the world? If not, then you still have some growing to do spiritually. We are to remain in Christ’s love and we are to love others as Christ has loved us.
Let me say it again: We love because Christ first loved us. And unless we have Christ’s love in our hearts, we simply cannot love others who are outside of our circle of intimate relationships. We simply do not have the power to love as Christ loved us unless we have Christ’s spirit within us. Then and only then can we fulfill his command to love others as he has loved us. That is what the cross is all about. We see his love poured out on the cross of Calvary.
Ripley’s Believe it or Not says that the longest love letter ever written was written in 1875 and it was written from a Parisian painter by the name of Marcel de Leclure. The letter was addressed to Magdalena de Villeray.
The painter was so in love with Magdalena that he wanted to write, Je t’aime “I love you” in French a thousand times for every year on the calendar. This was in 1875, so he decided to write “I love you” one million eight hundred and seventy-five thousand times. Of course, he didn’t want to write “I love you” that many times himself. So he hired a secretary to do it. But, he did not want to diminish his expression of his love, so he did not tell her to write the sentence one million eight hundred and seventy-five thousand times. Rather, he dictated each “I love you” to her separately. So he said “I love you” one million eight hundred and seventy-five thousand times and she wrote it one million eight hundred and seventy-five thousand times.
Ripley describes this feat like this, “Never was love made manifest by as great an expenditure of time and effort.” (7)
It’s a great story, but Ripley was wrong. There was once a time when love was made manifest by a greater expenditure of effort than that of this Frenchman. It was that time when the Lord Jesus hung on a cross to show us how important we are to God. “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command . . . This is my command: Love each other.”
The Golden Rule, as wonderful as it is, is insufficient for this task. We are not simply to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. We are to do unto them as Christ has done unto us.
1. Melvin M. Newland, http://www.visitgateway.org/Services/Messages/2014/05-11-14/Gary_Gaertner_05_11_14.pdf.
2. Jerry Shirley, http://gbcdecatur.org/sermons/NoGreaterLove.html.
3. Uncle John’s Perpetually Pleasing Bathroom Reader (Bathroom Readers’ Institute).
4. Nancy Abeshaus (Reader’s Digest USA).
5. From a sermon by Dr. Donald K. Ashe.
6. (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2002), pp. 171-172.
7. John F. MacArthur, http://www.gty.org/resources/sermons/2358/the-great-commandment.