Easter 5 (John 13:31-35) “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

Jesus loves everyone with a perfect unconditional universal love.

The love that Jesus embodies is the very nature of God. No human being can generate this love. All human beings can receive this love and share this love.

It is impossible to fulfill this teaching apart from a personal relationship with God the Father, through God the Son, by the indwelling of God the Holy Spirit.

The love that Jesus commands is both incarnational and Trinitarian.

If you attempt to live the Christian ethic (as some would call the teachings of Jesus) apart from an ongoing active dynamic and transforming relationship with Jesus Christ you will fail. You will not only fail you will become frustrated, fearful, angry and discouraged.

What makes divine love possible is divine love.

Moses teaches that God created humanity in His image. The prophets and apostles clarify for us that the image of God is love. Jesus is the personal presence of love in the human community.

God designed human beings by the pattern of love for the purpose of love according to the plan of love.  That reality helps us to understand the broad underlying problem that confronts our species. And, that reality helps us to understand the solution God offers our species.

The means by which God addresses the interaction of the problem and the solution is personal. The Bible is the normative record of the process of divine love meeting human resistance to love. Over the course of time many people recorded in the books of the Bible their observations of how individuals, families, tribes and nations react to God, the universe and each other.

The Bible is a record of how people choose and expand broken relationships.

The pattern of human nature emerges in the record of these observations. The pattern that emerges is a pattern of separation. Separation produces pain. Pain distorts our reason, will and emotions to produce fear. Fear results in a series of defensive strategies the soul creates to protect itself and to justify itself in its choice to maintain separation.

What the Bible calls sin is one of many consequences of this process of pain- distortion- fear- defense and isolation.

As the problem is rooted in the distortion of love so the solution derives from the very origin and source of love.

That origin and source is God. The means by which God applies the solution is personal. Because it is personal it emerges in personal relationships.

The Primary relationship God offers is also the defining relationship of our species. It is our relationship with the Beloved Son of God incarnate in Jesus Christ.

If there were a theme song to describe the human condition it would be something like: “looking for love in all the wrong places.”

God the Father designed our species and each of us by love, in love and for love. Our choice to separate from God results in the pain of separation from love. The original pattern is still present in the human soul. The pain of separation distorts our awareness of that pattern. In the pain of separation and the distortion that pain produces we are lost.

We are not just accidentally lost- we are willfully and spitefully lost. We cannot find our way back to love from the place of separation without help. That help is Jesus.

God finds us in Jesus in three very significant ways.

The first way is the incarnation. Jesus unites divinity with humanity so God can experience humanity and humanity can experience divinity.

The second way is the way of grace. Grace is the outpouring of unconditional infinite and eternal love. This is no vague intellectual category or metaphysical speculation. This is a real experience of divine favor in the ordinary events of our lives.

The third way is the way of personal transformation.  As we meet divine love in a personal relationship with Jesus we are transformed by divine love. Jesus is the perfect mirror to a soul lost in separation. He shows us where we are lost and in distortion. He shows us a path forward to be found. He sends the Holy Spirit to assist us in the way forward.

Divine love images divine truth. Divine truth shows us where pain and fear distort love.

The process of transformation emerges through a set of three basic relationships. The first of these is our relationship to God in Christ through worship. The second is our relationship with other people through service. The third is the relationship with the image of God we manifest from the depth of our souls through the process of observation, purification and transformation.

The reality of love is the quality of our relationships.

The threefold set of personal relationships is the key to fulfilling Jesus’ goal for our lives to love each other as he loves us.