To Love, You Must Act
We are called by Jesus, the Good Shepherd, to love one another as He loves us. He asks us to engage in an active relationship with Him in order to make the world a better place. Are we willing to sacrifice our own wants and desires, to take His hand and trust that He will lead us to green pastures?
May 11 was Youth Sunday at Grace, and the homily was delivered by Evelyn Higginbotham, a graduating Senior.
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Transcript
“‘How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.’ Jesus answered, ‘I have told you, and you do not believe.”
It’s a fact of life that good relationships require effort and maintenance. You have to have the courage to reintroduce yourself to the people in your life over and over as you change and grow, as they change and grow. It can be very unsettling, even frightening, to reach a point in your life where you realize your relationships don’t look the same as they used to, that you don’t look the same as you used to. The puzzle pieces of your life that you’ve put together so carefully and intentionally for years, maybe even decades, are loosening and shifting, and unless you actively make the choice to reach out and readjust them, they will fall apart. It takes bravery and trust on both ends of every good relationship to reach out and communicate that you need something to change; bravery to express your own growth and discomfort, and trust that the other person will understand and be willing to meet you where you’re at, to evolve and grow with you. It can be especially daunting to know that, as your life goes on, you will reach more milestones and have to have these conversations all over again, and again, and again. But to sacrifice your comfort for effective communication is one of the purest acts of love. In fact, in and of itself, to love, you must act, you must be active. The relationship we are called to have with Jesus is an active one, and that’s something that I think a lot of us struggle with. He calls us to better ourselves, our communities, our world according to His vision—not what we believe a perfect world would look like. He reaches out to us in this relationship, tells us that He needs us to take His hand, to change, to meet Him where He’s at and do God’s work. But that’s a tall order. To sacrifice our own wants and desires in order to follow Jesus requires a lot of change, and the truth is, most of us would much rather stay in the familiar stagnancy of ignorance. Doing God’s work means you must give up your privilege, you must go against the system that benefits you in order to change it for the better. It requires you to hold yourself to a higher standard, to risk losing the respect of people who would rather make idols of themselves and their own ideals. It requires you to think, to seek new perspectives, to train your intellect and offer empathy freely, to give yourself up for the service of your neighbors and enemies. Jesus challenges us, and if we actively listen and accept, He will transform us into conduits and catalysts for radical, magical, love-fueled, worldview-flipping change. To love Jesus and to love one another is to trust, to be brave, to evolve. To love Jesus is to reach out and grab His hand and act.
In today’s Gospel reading, those gathered around Jesus in the temple that day were struggling with the fact that to follow Jesus is to participate in that kind of active relationship, to choose to abandon what is known and comfortable. In this passage, the temple authorities and Jesus? Totally opposite outlooks on religion. Jesus is focused on fostering transformational change within God’s people, while the temple leaders cling to their transactional religious functions. They have found worldly comfort in a fine-tuned, static existence with no room for any kind of action, positive or negative. Jesus is promoting the complete opposite of everything they cherish, everything they identify themselves by. He performs miracles freely in the street, preaches radical ideals about how society should be restructured in order to facilitate God’s will. The temple leaders—and everyone who shares their rigid beliefs—see Jesus’ work as a threat rather than something to be celebrated, because in performing miracles, Jesus is reorganizing the way their society functions. His ideals threaten their very way of life, their positions at the top of the social hierarchy, their sources of power.
“If we are to be able to maintain the status quo,” the temple authorities think to themselves, “Then we have got to get this heretic and His dangerous ideas out of here. He’s going to mess everything up.” So, they test Him. They ask Him, “How long are you going to keep us in suspense? How long are you going to annoy us with your miracles and your speeches? Just tell us who you think you are, that you can come in here and upend everything we’ve worked so hard to establish.” But then, Jesus throws it back at them. He says, “I have told you, and you do not believe.” “I have told you, and you do not believe.
The works Jesus has done in God’s name testify to Jesus’ character and identity. He has embodied the word of God in its truest form; He has loved His enemies, He has put the needs of others before His own, He has done exactly as God would do because the Father and Jesus are one. But they still do not believe. It’s almost as if He’s asking, “Would it even matter to you if I was the Messiah? Would it change anything?” Would Jesus saying plainly, “Oh, yeah, my bad, I am the Messiah! Hope that clears things up for you!” make his works in the eyes of the people antagonizing Him seem any less like threats? Would they be any more likely to reach out and partake in an active, transformational relationship with God?
Then, Jesus gets real serious with the temple authorities. He says, “You are not my sheep. My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.” This is a very good metaphor for what’s happening here, I think Jesus did a great job with this one. You see, shepherds, in order to gain the trust of their flock, must employ patience and positive reinforcement consistently in everything they do for their sheep. Without the shepherd caring for their flock, the sheep will ignore and avoid them when they call. So, if we take this into account, we can better understand what Jesus means when He says the temple authorities are “not His sheep.” He is telling them He’s consistently shown Himself to be someone who upholds the word of God. He has called for them to do their part and join Him, to build a relationship with Him and better themselves and their society, but they won’t listen. His disappointment with the temple leaders is palpable in this moment, because it is really clear He wants to cultivate a positive relationship with them. He is reaching out, but they will not take His hand, because to do so would be to abandon what is familiar and easy and manageable.
I know that in my life, there have been many instances where I have been called to actively reevaluate my place in a relationship, to acknowledge my own shortcomings and meet a loved one where they are for the betterment of our relationship as a whole. I have had to make the choice to sacrifice my comfort for effective communication, and I’m sure many of you have, too. The question is, are we willing to answer?
While it is never an easy choice to make, that decision to act leads us one step closer to better understanding one another, one step closer to loving our neighbors the way Jesus is calling us to do, one step closer to realizing the world Jesus is calling us to build.
Amen.