Love, Friends, Slaves: Not a Sermon

Okay, this is pretty futile for me, because I hardly know what I’m doing. By no means a Greek scholar or a New Testament scholar, and aware and quite conscious that at this age my ability in all things mental slips, slips, slips, I nevertheless enjoy picking through this stuff, and the picking through works best for me if I jot things down.

The gospel for this morning, John 15:9-17. For myself, I’ve lined up two columns so I can compare them, English (NRSV) and Greek (SBLGNT). With four choices of Greek (two TR), I prefer this one because it has the accent and breathing marks so I can pronounce it better even just moving my lips. The NRSV text is printed below. From the Greek I’m picking out three words that interest me at the moment. Someone else might pick out five words, or four, or one, and different words entirely. But lifted from the text, my words are ἀγάπῃ (love), φίλοι (friends), and δοῦλος (slave).

First of all, in the passage the word translated “love” is the NT Greek word agape. Mindful of eros, storge, agape, philia — agape is love that’s not a feeling, it’s not about whether you like someone or not, it’s how you treat other people, how you are to treat your neighbor, and it signifies commitment. It’s courtesy, kindness, thoughtfulness, charity, generosity. It applies whether or not you even know the other, it can be an anonymous person or group of people, nation, on the other side of the world, people you never heard of. I suppose it could include how we treat the earth. In other verses Jesus says love your neighbor as yourself, and it applies not only to the folks next door but to the people on the other side of the block whom you wouldn’t know if they rode by on a bicycle and waved. Jesus’ commandment in this gospel reading is that those who believe in him are to treat each other kindly, decently. In the marriage rite, the most common scripture we hear may be 1st Corinthians 13, Paul’s chapter on love, that concludes “then abide faith, hope, and love, these three, but the greatest of these is love.” As it is read and heard everyone is thinking erotic thoughts of romantic love, but that’s not at all what it’s about, the NT Greek word there is agape' and it’s about how people are to treat others, especially in my view, people we don’t even know. The beloved KJV renders it not love, but charity, and I think that’s truest to the sense of Paul’s message, not something about newlyweds on their honeymoon.

My word from the text also is philoi, friends. Our city phil-adelphia, two Greek words, the first part means friend/love, the second part means brother. It involves feelings, warm feelings toward each other, toward others. It signifies different than agape. There is something I’ve mentioned here before, and I think maybe in a sermon, what to me seems to be an intriguing shift at the very end of Gospel John — chapter 21, where the story teller describes a post-resurrection appearance: Jesus on the beach with several disciples, the dialog with Simon Peter who only three days earlier had denied even knowing Jesus before he was condemned and sent to the cross. Jesus asks, Simon, do you agape me? Simon seeming, I think, stung with guilt at what he did, answers, Lord, I philo you, indicating warm feelings not just a charitable commitment. Apparently not having his question answered (and also maybe Gospel John wants to have a classic set of three), Jesus repeats, “Simon, do you agape me?” Simon Peter in my mind’s eye is shaken. He repeats, “Lord, I philo you,” to me meaning that his feelings for Jesus are way beyond what is signified by agape. I think that Jesus by this time is moved and himself close to tears, as he asks the third time, but different, “Simon do you philo me? And I see Simon Peter responding the third time, “Lord, you know I philo you,” I am your friend, covers his face with his hands as he dissolves in sobs of shame and knowing that he is being forgiven, because that is what Jesus too wants more than anything. Again, no scholar, I could be entirely wrong about what Gospel John intends to tell in this intensely moving scene, but that’s the way I read it. It’s part of what makes John’s gospel so much more powerful than Mark who, because he tells of no post-resurrection appearance, provides no opportunity for such emotional, powerful, forgiveness and reconciliation; the scene in John 21 is in fact, the resurrection of Simon Peter, fully restored to life in Christ.

Finally, I was looking at the Greek word doulos. Most translators soften it to servants but I remember my New Testament professor at LTSG telling us that it actually refers to slaves, slavery. For more than three decades, that returns to mind whenever I see the word rendered “servants,” and it bothers me that someone has tried to soften the harsh sense of the word, what? to keep from offending me with the truth? IDK. It also bothers me a little that although Gospel John has Jesus say, "No longer do I call you doulos," I can’t find any instance in John’s gospel where Jesus actually does call anyone his slaves. Am I to read between John’s lines and wonder if the disciples were being talked-down-to right up until that last night of Jesus’ extreme humility in the foot washing? I don't think so, but I don’t know that either. However, it stirs my own mind and conscience to wonder whether people ever feel that I have talked down to them. I do remember once, as a junior officer, an ensign on board my first ship, it would have been 1958, having an argument with Siegel, a first class petty officer who was one of my division heads. There was a point at which he indicated I had embarrassed him and robbed him of his dignity by hollering at him. I remember saying, “Siegel, I didn’t holler at you.” He said, “Yes, you hollered at me, Sir.” I asked another first class petty officer in the room, “Did I holler at Siegel?” The answer, “Yes Sir, you did” I’ve held in mind for almost sixty years now, as a caution that when I’m in the superior position, people don’t always hear what I think I said, and I try to be careful about how I sound to others. I've not always been successful with that, maybe especially with my own children, whom I love so dearly. 

If this morning’s blog post were a sermon it would be a terrible one. But it isn’t a sermon. It’s just that the gospel has taken me out in left field somewhere. 

Peace.

TomW+

John 15:9-17New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

9 As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. 10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. 11 I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.

¹² “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. ¹³ No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. ¹⁴ You are my friends if you do what I command you. ¹⁵ I do not call you servants^[a] any longer, because the servant^[b] does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. ¹⁶ You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. ¹⁷ I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.