The Unhurried Way of Love

In these weeks following Easter, our church community has been focusing on “Resurrection: A New Life of Love.” The essence of the risen life is love. Living a risen life is living in Jesus’ way of love.

We live in Southern California, and it can be a very hurried place. I have a little made up word to describe one way I experience the chronic hurry of our region.

The word is “gronk.” “It is a contraction of green and honk, and it represents the nanosecond of time between the fresh green light in front of us and the angry horn blasting behind us. It is an inflammation of impatience. It is an utter lack of simple kindness. It is chronic and epidemic. And, bottom line, it is unloving.”

In so many people there is an absolutely epidemic lack of patience and kindness—a lack of what Francis de Sales called “the little virtues.”

Virtues like patience, humility, gentleness, simplicity, honesty, and hospitality lived out in your ordinary, daily life. They are little virtues because they aren’t the ones that tend to make headlines. They don’t seem impressive or heroic.

But these little virtues are the virtues of love.

They are the ordinary ways that we live a life of love in our simple, everyday lives.

In our gospel text, Jesus gets at the essence of this at the very beginning of our reading: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you (12-14).”

Jesus is saying, “Love is at the center of who I am. Love is the essence of our friendship. Love is how my friends live. Love is the greatest life there is. Love is the great commandment.”

And in his letter, John tells us this: “Beloved, I am writing you no new commandment, but an old commandment that you had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word that you have heard. At the same time, it is a new commandment that I am writing to you, which is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining. (1 Jn 2:7-8).”

It’s not a new commandment in that it is as old as Moses. It’s really as old as creation, even as ancient at the very Being of God .

But John wants us to realize that it is new in Jesus.