NOTES for Joh 15:9-10

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.

How piercing are the words about the love that lays down “one’s life for one’s friends”... My own response to these words is bewilderment and the realization that this is impossible by human strength, and therefore the recognition that I myself do not love... How greatly must one love in order to die for others? We have only one example before us, the foremost and most important for each of us: Jesus Christ. How greatly He loves every one of us, since He went to death for our sake! And not merely to death, but to torment beyond all bounds, though He was without sin and without guilt. Here lies the most important thing: to look at Him, understanding that only He can love in this way and share this love with those who believe in Him; to rejoice in our salvation, which came through the Lord and His sacrifice, rather than grieve because we ourselves cannot love like this. Then, in us as in many others, He will be able to do something worthy of His name. This is how, for example, He acted through Maximilian Kolbe and Mother Maria, who were in concentration camps and took the place in gas chambers of those who had been condemned to death.

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.