Fifth Sunday of Easter
May 6, 2007


How do you put together the words ‘commandment’ and ‘love’?

There is a story told of a father whose wife had just given birth to their third child, a baby girl. And the end of the day at the hospital, after making sure that mother and daughter were fine, he went by his parent’s house and picked up his two boys, aged 3 and 5. “Boys”, he said, “God has blessed our family with a beautiful little girl. You now have a baby sister. And I command you to love her. I command you to love her.” Most of us would simply look at the father as if he had a hole in his head. Yet, as the father tells the story, about 15 years later, they began to do just that… All of us who have siblings know that you can never command love between family members. It is something you grow into. We love because something within draws us to another.

So isn’t it odd that Jesus tells us: “I command you to love one another”? It is like ordering children to love each other. It won’t work. Or at least it won’t work in a cause and effect kind of way. Yet this is exactly what Jesus orders us to do: To love as we have been loved. So it got me to wondering how Jesus was putting together those two words: Love and Commandment. And though the scriptures are silent about that question, here is where my prayer took me this week.

This Lent, my gift to God was to give up eating between meals, and then, each time I felt hungry, to let those hunger pangs move me to prayer for those who always go without food. I also would make a donation to a kitty that would go to a hunger based charity. The unintended side effect was that I lost ten pounds during Lent. Which kind of blew me away, because for the last 5 years or so I have been telling myself it is time to lose some weight. Even though my head had been telling me to lose weight, I could never get around to actually doing it. My head never convinced my body to lose the weight. But now, as I was choosing not to eat between meals, my brain began to change. It was tough the first three weeks. But slowly each time I want to eat a snack between meals, there is this little voice that said: “No, you really don’t need this. You don’t want it, and it won’t be helpful. Pray for the really hungry and just put the food down, dummy.” My actions had changed my way of thinking.

Or, to put it in psychological terms: “It is easier to act ourselves into a new way of thinking than it is to think ourselves into a new way of acting…”

Jesus, on the night of that last supper, knew that he had to find a way for his thick headed disciples to get what he was about. What does he do? He gives them an action. He washes their feet and then commanded them to do the same. He tells them to ‘act themselves into a new way of thinking’ – by loving as he had loved them. That’s how Jesus puts together the word commandment and the word love – by inviting us to act ourselves into a new way of thinking. When our minds aren’t big enough to change our actions, let our actions do the changing instead.

So I invite you for the rest of this Easter season to do an experiment. Be intentional about showing love to someone in your life who it has been less than easy for you to love. Begin by forcing your face to smile instead of frown each time you think of them. Make sure you greet them with a bright hello each time you run into them. Perhaps even invite them over for coffee and conversation. I suspect you will find that there is much more that is the same about you than is different between you. And whatever you do, don’t let your head get in the way of your actions. You head will find a thousand reasons to hang onto the resentment and anger. Instead, act yourself into a new way of thinking, and a new way of loving.
And then we will all discover the deepest truth Jesus wants us to know about those two contradictory words – Commandment and Love. That obeying his COMMANDMENT is the only way we’ll ever get to where Jesus wants us to be – the loving of one another as he has loved us…