Aug 5, 2022
The Almost Daily will be on Summer Vacation until August 8th. But fear not! You will receive a devotional each Monday through Friday from the excellent Mockingbird Devotional entitled Daily Grace. Enjoy! - Paul Walker
“No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” (John 15:13)
In my early twenties I spent a summer working as a cashier at a Dollar General. One day a heavily-bearded fellow in sunglasses looked straight at me as I was ringing him up and said, “Greater love has no man than this: to lay down his life for his friends.” Awkwardly, I mumbled back, “Uh...good quote, man.”
These are powerful words but not easy ones. In the preceding verse, Jesus had issued a version of his great love-commandment, synthesizing all the law and prophets. Here, we get a glimpse of what that love demands. The stories of martyred saints throughout history fill us with inspiration and conviction: We feel that some great power of love is at work in them, and instinctively seek to honor them, even as we hope never to have to emulate them. I think of the young couple who, in August 2019, died shielding their 2-month-old child in the El Paso Walmart shooting. If that’s not a powerful image of Christ-like love, I don’t know what is.
There is immense tragic beauty in someone dying for others, a beauty that inspires believers and nonbelievers alike. Think of all the self-sacrificial film heroes: Gandalf and Frodo, Harry Potter, Iron Man, Groot, John Coffey, Aslan, Neo, that racist dude from Gran Torino... Perhaps nothing is more compelling to the human soul than the image of someone giving up their life out of love for others, and that’s precisely the type of love that Christ establishes as the ideal in this verse. This is no mere affection between friends or lovers—this is agape, the expansion of the self to include the needs and concerns and desires of others as equal to our own. This is a call to love friends and enemies alike perhaps more than we love ourselves, even to the point of death. It’s an insanely high bar.
Don’t feel up to it? Neither do I. It’s one thing to say, as Peter did, that we will gladly lay down our lives. It’s quite another, as Peter found out, to actually do it.
But the good news is that Christ provides the initiative. At several points in this long sermon from John, Jesus makes that explicit, saying “I have loved you... I have called you... I chose you... I appointed you...” He speaks of sending an “Advocate”. I used to believe that love was some coldly rational decision we make, day-in and day-out, but no. Love is not something we control. It involves difficult choices and sacrifices, to be sure, but the strength to love is most of all a gift of the Spirit, who is with us today and for all time.
[Benjamin Self, Daily Grace - Mockingbird Devotional Vol. 2]
