Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Fifth Sunday of Easter 2025

There is a beautiful story told by St Jerome, towards the end of the 300s AD, about the end of the life of St John the Evangelist, the writer of the fourth gospel, who has given the Church so much of her teaching about Jesus, his identity, and his mission. An early medieval version of the tale goes like this:

‘When the holy apostle became very weak, the blessed Jerome relates, his disciples carried him to the church, but he was no longer able to give long sermons. He then reduced his teaching to the unceasing repetition of “Little children, love one another.” One day when his disciples asked him why he repeated this to them incessantly, John replied with the following words: “This is the Lord’s commandment; and if you keep it, it is enough.”’

St John, by tradition, is the so-called beloved disciple, particularly close to Jesus, so it is perhaps unsurprising that the focus of his teaching was that New Commandment which the Lord gave to his followers on the night before he died. ‘Love one another. Just as I have loved you’, says Jesus. That is perhaps what makes this commandment ‘new.’ We are to imitate the kind of love and the depth of love with which Jesus himself operates. How are we to do that, but as ‘children’ (teknia) – the only time this word is used in the Gospel, but which is then picked up repeatedly, again and again, in St Johns’ first Letter. We are to imitate Christ. To learn his pattern by watching him, and learning his gestures, his speech, his actions. It’s easy to imagine how the disciples of the very elderly and distinguished St John might have approached him for his wisdom or his memories of Jesus in great expectation of some dazzling mystical teaching. One can almost imagine them saying, ‘Haven’t you got anything else?! Anything deeper?!’ And yet, the great evangelist, the disciple especially beloved of the Lord tells them, ‘This is Jesus’s commandment; and if you keep it, it is enough.’ The love to which Jesus summons us is an entire conversion of life and heart – a maximal kind of love – because we are to love as Christ loves. As God loves. 

One of the greatest commentators in the Christian tradition, who explored this theme with immense passion and depth, is St Augustine. Augustine was a bishop in north Africa in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. Born and brought up a pagan, Augustine became a Christian and was baptised at the hands of St Ambrose in the year 387. His autobiographical work, known as the Confessions, is a long text of prayer, wonder and reflection. Augustine learns that although we cannot ever separate our love of God from our love of neighbour, we begin to love God precisely by loving our neighbour. He speaks to us across the years. There is nobody who does not love. The only question is what they love.

This morning in Rome, Pope Leo is to begin his papal ministry. Pope Leo is an Augustinian friar by background, particularly shaped by St Augustine’s theology. He becomes Bishop of Rome at a time when both church and world are in great need of the solidarity Christ has given to the world through his resurrection. As Augustine himself preached on the Gospel we have just heard, ‘By loving us Christ bound us to one another in mutual love, and by this gentle bond united us into the body of which he is the most noble Head’ – in Christ, together, we are organically related to one another, as a kind of ‘first-fruit’ of the new world beginning to emerge as a result of Christ’s ministry, death and resurrection. That is one reason why the unity of Christians matters so much: we should pray for it, work for it, and seek to receive the unity of the Body of Christ as a gift. Today, over 400 years after the reformation which separated the Church of England from the Roman See, we pray for Pope Leo as a bishop for all Christians, with a ministry of love and communion for non-Roman Catholics, as well as for his own Church. How urgently the world needs the encouragement of Jesus’s love, which is ‘enough’ of a remedy for all the sadness and violence which characterises so much of our time. 

“This is the Lord’s commandment; and if you keep it, it is enough.” How is this the case? Firstly, everything else we have to say theologically about Christ, creation, salvation, the Church, and one another, springs from this love. This love is the source and wellspring of all truth. Loving one another as Jesus loves is a practical ethic of compassion, service, and justice. It is also a political philosophy and way of joyfully encountering diversity and difference. If I only love people who agree with me, people who think like me, I am really only loving myself. To love one another is to recognise inherent dignity in the other, it is to listen to the other, to acknowledge our weaknesses to one another, and to become vulnerable, whilst speaking good of the other. This love is communicative. It will tell, show, act, and transform. St Augustine himself, preaching on how the Christian is called to love everyone, even those who root what they do in the power of evil: ‘he is not yet a brother, but you love to the end he may be a brother.’[1] The love of Jesus heals and transforms. These insights can be expanded throughout and between societies. They help us not only to negotiate difference, but to insist on dignity, and to see how difference and diversity are God-given gifts which always reveal yet more of the inexhaustible nature of God’s love. Today we pray that in the years ahead, this Augustinian Pope may be able to teach us about this love in distinctive ways, for the healing of the Church, for the healing of our societies, and for the healing of our own souls. 

The New Commandment, to love one another as Jesus loves, should mark Christians out as distinctive in the life of the world. ‘By this everyone will know that you are my disciples’, teaches Christ. Tragically, we are often known for other, less wholesome reasons. Our ability to fall out with, rather than fall in with each other, our tendency to judge, not with the heart of Jesus, but with hearts of stone, are habits which obscure the Gospel, so that it no longer appears Good News for many. If we love one another as Jesus loves, we will live the Good News, and become part of the Easter Mystery which is at the centre of the world’s renewal. St Augustine, the great bishop-theologian of north Africa, tried to explain it to his congregation in this way:

‘This is the love that renews us, making us a new humanity, heirs of the New Testament, singers of the new song… This is the love that is now renewing the nations, and from among the universal human race, which overspreads the whole world, is making and gathering together a new people, the body of the newly-married spouse of the only-begotten Son of God.’[2]

“This is the Lord’s commandment; and if you keep it, it is enough.”