MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMALS

Rev Dr Nikolai Blaskow

John 15.9-17

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 any longer, because the servant 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. 

I begin with a question – what would you have thought, if instead of our reading, Jesus had said: “I do not call you friends any longer. I call you servants … because you already know too much about what I’m doing.”

You’d be shocked - wouldn’t you?

Gerald Durrel also jolts our complacency I think when he entitles his book My Family and Other Animals, because it suggests that animals and family are one and the same. Let’s face it, we don’t like to think of ourselves on the same plane as animals. Because it takes us to the heart of our origins and evolutionary theory. And that makes us feel uncomfortable.

Let’s leave that sitting there for the time being.

So why have I reversed Jesus’ beautiful words on friendship? My not unkind observation is that all too often Christians say one thing but do

another – we say “Jesus loves me this I know… for the Bible tells me so,” but we often either take Karl Barth’s favourite verse of that great hymn to mean just “us” and not “them,” but also we act out to ourselves and others that we are servants after all if not slaves … aren’t we all sinners? – why would this angry God whose anger must be appeased at all times, treat us anything less than slaves to sin?

That’s the challenge I want us all to face this morning:

are we servants or are we friends of God … and if friends, how do we live out that friendship not just in our intentions but in our actions?

Jan Richardson’s idea of ‘blessing’ might be a good starting point. Surely, Jesus in our reading is offering us a blessing – she calls it a ‘Blessing That Meets You in Love’:

It is true that every blessing begins with love,

that whatever else it might say,

love is always precisely its point. But it should be noted

that this blessing has come today especially to tell you

it is crazy about you.

That it has been in love with you forever.

That it has never not wanted to see your face,

to go through this world in your company.

This blessing thought it was high time - it told you so –

just to make sure you know.

If it has been shy in saying this, it has not been for any lack of wanting to.

It’s just that this blessing knows the risk of offering itself in a way that will so alter you—not because it thinks you could stand some improving,

but because this is simply where loving leads.

This blessing knows how love undoes us unhides us.

It knows how loving can sometimes feel like dying.

But today this blessing has come to tell you the secret that sends it

to your door: that it gives itself only to those willing to come alive;

that it vows itself only to those ready to be born anew [all over again].

Jan Richardson:

Loving is always risky because we cannot enter into it without being changed. Altered. Transformed. In the face of this, we might well ask, Do I really want this? Do we really desire to be so undone?

Loving is never just about opening our heart. It is about being willing to have our heart become larger as we make room for people and stories and experiences we never imagined holding.

It is about being willing to have our heart become deeper as we move beyond the surface layers of our assumptions, prejudices, and habits in order to truly see and receive what—and who—is before us. It is about being willing to have our heart continually shattered and remade as we take in not only the brokenness of the world but also the beauty of it, the astounding wonder that will not allow us to remain the same. 

We could and almost should stop there. And reflect only on that poem and those insights – because when Jesus about love, he’s talking about what is central to life, not peripheral. And the core not just of life, but of even the material fabric of the cosmos itself (why do we think of ourselves as different from the material when we ourselves are whirring molecules and electrons and stardust)?

Yes… LOVE sits there at the core of all that is – material, spiritual, botantical – animal.

It is active not passive. It is always consensual never coercive. It is open – never closed… trustworthy never duplicitous or capricious or harassing. It’s a prodigal, not a skinflint.

As my Father has loved me before the beginning of all things the way you see them now, that’s the love I offer you. All you have to do is to stay in its force field. And joy will be your constant companion. 

As you immerse yourself in it you will discover it flowing from you to others – to the point where you will freely give it away – that’s what true friends do even giving away the most precious thing they have – life itself.