NOTES for Joh 15:9-17

Speaking of love as a new commandment, Jesus first of all requires every Christian to be ready to “lay down his life for his friends.” Usually this is understood as readiness to give up one’s life for friends. Yet the corresponding Greek verb means not “give up,” but precisely “lay down,” “place” — and not “instead of,” but precisely “for the sake of,” “on behalf of” friends. Obviously, this is not about self-sacrifice, or at least not only about it; rather, we should speak of the relationships that bind together people who live by the love with which Jesus loved each person. But what is this love of His, the love of the Kingdom? How does it differ from the love that people knew long before His coming into the world?

First of all, in this: human love has never been complete. It remained only an intention, a relationship, and in this sense it was a spiritual reality. But the environment within which relationships of love existed was natural, psychic: in the fallen state, after all, the human being remained primarily a natural being, and the psyche too is nature, only of a special kind.

Jesus, however, speaks of the love of the Kingdom, that Kingdom where the very environment of communion is not natural but spiritual. There love can be manifested in absolute fullness: in the Kingdom, the relationships and the environment fully correspond to one another. But a person’s life in the Kingdom cannot belong to that person alone.

Jesus Himself explains this simply: whoever wants to keep his life for himself loses it, but whoever gives it to Him and makes it part of the life of His Kingdom preserves it. And preserves it in a fullness that cannot be found in the fallen world. But if this is true of the life of the Kingdom as a whole, it is just as true when the matter concerns the relationship of the inhabitants of the Kingdom to one another: they too never belong only to themselves; their life never is and never can be something isolated, as the life of a person in the untransfigured world can be.

Of course, in the Kingdom too each person lives his own life, not someone else’s. But if the boundaries of this life in the fallen world are often closed to any interaction, in the Kingdom they are always open. There this is safe: since the life of each person is determined by God’s breath, no one abuses this openness as sometimes happens in the fallen world.

And with such openness the possibilities become immense: if necessary, each person can at any moment even completely yield his own living space to another, should the need arise. No unsolvable tasks remain for the inhabitants of the Kingdom, for there are no barriers between them either. And therefore there are no barriers for God’s breath, which unites them. Each person lives a full life, belonging at the same time both to himself and to everyone who wants to share in that fullness and take part in it.

This is the kind of life the Savior commands His disciples to live. In essence, it is Christianity itself.

The Father’s love for the Son is manifested in their inseparable unity, and the Lord invites us to abide in the same love. Are we ready for such love — not even to love in this way ourselves, since it is clear that we are not ready for that, but to receive it from Christ? Receiving love cannot be passive; it demands efforts in response, but do we always respond actively to Christ’s love? Yet even when He receives no response, He continues to love us.

He called the disciples not servants but friends, and not only those who were beside Him, but all whom He called to follow Him. He wants to raise us to a height that is difficult to reach without Him; our heads already begin to spin before the ascent has even started.

But if we are not servants to Him, then we must not be servants to one another either. Yet we want to rule, and so it is hard to accept His gift; we feel compelled to repeat after the disciple: “depart from me, for I am a sinful man.” Christ can, in fact, withdraw if we persistently beg Him to do so; He does not impose Himself by force. But He comes as a liberator, and whoever rejects Him of their own will remains a slave to sin.

In essence, two paths lie before us: to follow Christ, listening to His Word, or to turn away from Him. Jesus calls us, knocks at the doors of our hearts (see Rev. 3:20), and asks: "Abide in My love" (John 15:9). He already loves us, regardless of who we are and how we behave, what we do, whether bad or good. Nothing will separate us from His love (see Rom. 8:35-39).

But even though Love is near, it can be rejected. It can go unseen or be despised, ignored as if it were nothing. But it is there, and it is eternal. That is why the Lord calls us to abide in this love, so that He can give us life, the strength to live, and finally eternity itself - Love itself. Entering into this Love, each of us not only answers the Love of the One who created him, but also enters Eternity, taking part in the work of his own salvation.

In this passage the Lord reveals to the disciples the essence of the commandment He leaves them. And the measure of love to which He calls them turns out to be equal to death. "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends" - such is this measure. Jesus calls us to forget ourselves, not to think about our own comfort or advantage, "not to seek our own," to give rather than demand. To die to ourselves and rise for our friends - this is the new commandment.

We know that Christ Himself loved us in this highest measure, giving His life on the Cross. And as we try to love our neighbors, we gradually enter this mystery of divine love. Freely fulfilling this covenant, we cease to be slaves and become His friends, those who "know what the master is doing" and truly understand what Jesus "heard from the Father."

Today's text, of course, first of all draws attention to the new commandment that Christ gives us as the only one necessary for life. But today I would like to note the line that Jesus builds in literally a few words and that contains the whole history of the relationship between man and God. I do not call you servants; I call you friends. And the measure of love for friends becomes the death of God for the life of human beings.

Reading the Gospel of John straight through, one constantly wants to pick up the pace and avoid thinking about the literal meaning of the words Jesus speaks, because their simplicity leaves no path for retreat. We are given the possibility of choice, but this choice lies between the words "yes" and "no." And by choosing "yes," faith in God's love for each person, His death and resurrection, in only three days we will hear at the empty tomb Jesus say to Mary Magdalene: "...go to My brothers". Thus, having passed through death, God became our brother.

Jesus often warned His followers that they would face rejection in the world, even persecution. And He sees the reason for this not in religious or other disagreements with the majority, but in the very essence of Christianity. For He brought the Kingdom into the world, and He wants His followers to be not adherents of some new teaching—religious, ethical, political, or otherwise—but inhabitants of the Kingdom. He certainly understands very well that the world will always reject such people: they will remain strangers to it until the end of time, until its complete transfiguration. But what can the Church set against the world? Jesus Himself points to the means: love. Of course, love—not as an emotion, but as a way of relating—is itself foreign to the fallen world. It is illogical and serves no practical purpose, for to love is to wish one's neighbor well and strive to make that person's life better, expecting nothing in return. Not only a cynic but even an ordinary pragmatist will say that living this way is unreasonable and impractical: love must at least be mutually beneficial to be at all acceptable to the fallen world. Yet by definition it cannot be so. And Jesus speaks of love not only as a relationship between people, but as the spiritual environment that constitutes the nature of the Kingdom. If ordinary human love, when it is genuine, usually provokes mockery and distrust, the love of the Kingdom can provoke outright hatred. This is hardly surprising: the fallen world preserves the illusion not only of stability but even of immovability largely because its adherents have managed to convince, if not everyone, then a great many people that there is no alternative to the existing state of affairs. When people appear who can offer such an alternative, the natural desire of those who support the existing order is to destroy that alternative—along with the One who brought the Kingdom into the world and those who bear witness to the alternative today.

Jesus builds His conversation with the disciples on a contrast: I give you a commandment to love one another because the world hates you. In the world there is hatred; among you there is love.

Two questions immediately arise here. First, can the disciples' love overpower the world's hatred, if the world is always larger and the disciples themselves do not really know how to love? And second, it is clear that the situation is not so polarized at all: in the world that does not believe in Christ, love is always present (for people cannot live entirely without love), and among Christians love, to put it mildly, is not the most frequent guest either.

As for the first question, one can only note that the matter is not the disciples' own love, but the mercy of the Father; and who is stronger - God or the world's evil - is a question addressed to the very depth of our being, since it has no "external" answer. As for polarization, the matter is apparently not a division into "believers and unbelievers" (it is unclear how to divide them), but the opposition between Christ and "the world" within each person again.

The passage from Christ's Last Discourse with the disciples that we read today reveals to us how the Lord Himself looks at the disciples. The point is that He, in fact, likens them to Himself. The world first hated Christ, and then His disciples. They do not belong to the world. People kept Christ's word, and they will also keep the disciples' word. Finally, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, and the disciples will bear witness to Jesus.

And the Lord says all this while explaining the commandment: "Love one another." This means that likeness to God and adoption as sons, for that is exactly what is being discussed, do not flow from some special superhuman merits of these Galilean fishermen, but from the fact that they will fulfill this commandment. Therefore Christ's words also apply to all who follow Christ's disciples in the Church, which He Himself founded precisely through these disciples.

On Good Friday, on a Good Friday that is not distant from us but closer than ever, although we were not yet alive then, Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh spoke these words from the pulpit. '<...> The Mother stood by the Cross; Her Son, betrayed, reviled, cast out, beaten, torn, tormented, was dying on the Cross. And She was dying with Him… Many, surely, looked at Christ; many, surely, felt shame and fear and did not look into His Mother's face. And now we turn to Her, saying: Mother, I am guilty—among others, yes—of Your Son's death; I am guilty—intercede for me. Save us through Your prayer, through Your protection, because if You forgive, no one will condemn or destroy us… But if You do not forgive, Your word will be stronger than any word spoken in our defense… <...> Let us stand before the judgment of our conscience, awakened by Her grief, and bring a repentant, contrite heart. Let us bring Christ our prayer that He may give us strength to awaken, come to our senses, come alive, become human, make our life deep and broad, capable of holding the Lord's love and presence. And with this love let us go out into life to create life, to fashion and build a world, deep and spacious, that would be like a garment clothing the Lord's presence, shining with all the light, all the joy of paradise. This is our calling; this is what we must accomplish by breaking ourselves, giving ourselves, dying if need be—and it is needed!—because to love is to die to oneself, to cease valuing oneself and instead value the other, whether God or a human being; to live for another, laying aside concern for oneself. Let us die as much as we can, let us strive with all our strength to die, so that we may live by love and live for God and for others.' So close to us is that Friday on which the Metropolitan spoke these words, as are all the Good Fridays that have been and will be. 'I am guilty.' I was not alive then, but I am guilty. We cannot regard this day as a symbolic commemoration of events that once took place. No. For the Body and Blood of which we partake are not a symbol, but the very Body and the very Blood. Here I am, and I am guilty here and now. It is frightening when people begin to greet one another for Easter in advance—this really happens, and happens often! Today I know nothing of Easter; I know only one thing: whether woman or man, I am guilty, for He died, and I did nothing to prevent it.

When speaking to His disciples about the Kingdom, Jesus constantly calls them to love one another (vv. 9-12, 17). This is unsurprising if we recall that Christianity is nothing other than life in the Kingdom, and therefore life in love. Love, of course, is not the Kingdom's only characteristic. The life of the Kingdom is also the breath of God that permeates it and those manifestations of God's power that accompany Jesus everywhere during His earthly ministry. Yet in our still not fully transformed world, the love characteristic of those who bear the Kingdom seems to be its clearest testimony.

Power, for example, is well known to the untransformed world. Indeed, in a world lying in evil there is sometimes even too much of it. Power can sometimes make people submit, but it cannot make them love. Relationships imposed by force, and therefore involuntary, are unsuitable for the Kingdom. Power in the fallen world will hardly be perceived as an alternative to the existing order. The same could be said of spiritual phenomena in themselves, for the fallen world too knows a peculiar kind of spirituality. The spiritual phenomena characteristic of fallen nature differ qualitatively in essence from the spiritual influences that proceed from the Kingdom, of course, but outwardly they can sometimes look alike, and to someone who sees only the outward appearance the difference may be imperceptible. Thus spirituality in itself does not necessarily mean that an alternative to the laws of this world has appeared.

For such an alternative to appear, everyone must be able not only to see clearly that Christ's disciples and followers possess a certain spirituality, but also to discern what it is. In this respect the witness of the love permeating every relationship in the Kingdom is the best, because mutual love visibly demonstrates to the world precisely what it does not have and what it lacks so greatly. Unlike power and spirituality as such, love can therefore become the alternative to the existing world order that the world both longs for and fears. It fears this alternative because, from the standpoint of the laws of our still untransformed world, relationships of love really are contrary to nature. Both nature and society, which has not moved so very far beyond it, follow different principles, relying on power, advantage, and efficiency.

It is no surprise that those who want to live differently in this world become a foreign body within it (vv. 18-19). But some are prepared at least to try to find an alternative, and so those who live by the laws of the Kingdom will face not only persecution. There will also be people ready to listen to their testimony and follow their path (v. 20). Nevertheless, Christ's disciples and followers should apparently neither try to escape persecution nor hope for their preaching to achieve mass success, for, in Jesus' words, “the servant is not greater than his lord.” Only the testimony is fundamentally important. Everyone decides for himself how to respond to it.