The Greatest Love of All

Fighting in south-eastern Afghanistan in 2008, with enemy fire whizzing and thudding all around, Australian Trooper Mark Donaldson was faced with a choice: to save himself or to risk his life to save his wounded comrade. Caught in a Taliban ambush of rockets and machine guns, Donaldson had already deliberately put himself in the firing line to draw enemy fire away from the wounded. But as he and his SAS mates instigated a fighting withdrawal, he realised a badly wounded Afghan interpreter had been left behind.

Still recovering from wounds received in an earlier battle in Afghanistan, Trooper Donaldson turned around and dashed across open ground to collect the man and bring him home. It was the longest 80m of his life. Bullets flew around him and the dust kicked up with explosions. After carrying the man on his back, he returned and continued fighting for the two hours it took for the convoy carrying the wounded to escape. He was awarded the the Victoria Cross.

No doubt war draws out both the best and the worst in people. Some combination of motives has lead millions of soldiers to give their lives in warfare during these last unprecedentedly bloody hundred years. To give the example of just one country: by the end of the First World War, 600,000 French women had been widowed and 700,000 children orphaned.

What would you be willing to lay down your life for? Not long ago I was talking to a young Captain – only in his twenties – who served in Afghanistan. He was accustomed to leading reconnaissance patrols in to areas and villages previously unentered by Coalition forces, not knowing what they would encounter. I couldn’t help wondering how I would react in such situations. What would we be willing to lay down our lives for?

I belong to a generation that has largely escaped that searching question. Perhaps that’s why a film like The Hurt Locker won the Oscar for Best Picture this year ahead of the entertainment blockbusters. It focuses on a US Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal team – bomb-disposal. One of the key characters lays his life on the line again and again – hundreds of times – as he removes yet more detonators from Improvised Explosive Devices. What is it that makes laying down your life worthwhile?

When Jesus was on the point of laying down his life, he challenged his disciples to be ready to do the same. You can find his words in John 15:12-14, which is on p1083 of the Bibles that are in the pews. This is what he said:

My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no-one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command.

What do we make of that for our own lives? Because the fact is, this is a challenge not just for those disciples, or for tommies in the trenches, but for us today, in our world of designer labels and the internet. Three points need to be made.


Firstly, THE GREATEST LOVE IS TO LAY DOWN YOUR LIFE FOR YOUR FRIENDS.

That is what Jesus says there in v13:

Greater love has no-one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.

To love in the sense that Jesus speaks of here is freely to put the interests of others before your own, for the sake of their welfare.

Love is not warm feelings. Nor is it acting in the interests of others just because we’re being forced to do so, like the musket fodder of the Napoleonic Wars who marched their way towards a wall of bullets with their sergeant’s pike pushing against their backs to hold the line in place. It’s not giving something to others for the sake of what we’ll get back, such as the adulation of a grateful nation for the returning heroes.

When Jesus says that the greatest love is to lay down your life for your friends, he’s saying that the greatest love puts no ceiling on what it is prepared to give for the sake of others. When the greatest love goes into action, it lays down no limit on how far it will go in purposeful self-sacrifice.

We’re not talking about futile gestures. We’re not talking about a pointless death. Rather, this kind of love engages in purposeful self-sacrifice. And the purpose is the good of others. The point of it all is to save the lives of those we love. But the greatest love is ready to give everything, even to die if necessary.

All other forms of love, the kinds with which we’re most familiar, are mixed with earth-bound self-interest. The greatest love sets aside self-interest and is ready to lay down its life those who are loved.

Most warfare is conducted with very mixed motives, but such love is at times exemplified in the heat of battle. An old soldier who’d seen much action finally died a few years ago. His obituary quoted the citation that accompanied the award of the Military Cross to him. He was, it said, “completely imperturbable under heavy artillery and mortar fire” and carried on his work with “complete disregard for his own safety”. “He has been completely unsparing of himself...” it concluded.

He did not spare himself. But deadly attacks are not confined to the military. Here is a press report from earlier this very week:

Christians in Baghdad huddle in churches these days, praying for deliverance from an ongoing campaign of persecution that threatens the viability of the 2,000-year-old religious community. A slew of attacks on homes and shops of Christians in the city killed six people and injured 33 since Tuesday evening, according to an Iraqi defence official.These latest attacks, small-scale by Iraqi standards, came just 10 days after a devastating Oct 31 hostage-taking in which 44 Christian worshippers, two priests and seven security personnel were killed when Iraqi forces stormed Baghdad’s Syrian Catholic Cathedral that had been seized by several Islamist gunmen. The group later declared Christians everywhere to be “legitimate targets.”

The greatest love, says Jesus, is to lay down your life for your friends. So what does that mean for us? To begin with, we need to accept Jesus’ standard as the benchmark of true love. We need to set our sights on the target that Jesus has given us. What is real love? It is purposeful self-sacrifice, even to the point of death.

Once we have accepted that benchmark, then we can begin to assess the way we love against that benchmark. We need to be frank with ourselves. Are we reluctant to love like that? Maybe we’ll find that there are strict limits to how far we’re prepared to go for the sake others - whether we count them as our friends or not.

But when we have seen ourselves clearly, what do we do then? We look at Jesus. And the next point that needs to be made is this:


Secondly, JESUS LAID DOWN HIS LIFE FOR HIS ENEMIES.

Jesus practiced what he preached, even to the point of dying for those who are deeply hostile towards him. So he says in John 15:12:

Love each other as I have loved you.

And how has he loved us? That is spelled out in other parts of the Bible. For instance, the apostle Paul puts it like this in Romans 5:6-8:

Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us... when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son...

And one of the closest friends of Jesus during his earthly life, the apostle John, says this, in 1 John 3:16:

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.

And again a bit later, in 1 John 4:9:

This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world, that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

You see, there is a war on, now today, and you and I are caught up in it. It is the war to end all wars. It is the war that God is fighting again sin, Satan and death. Jesus has fought for us. He has died for us, not in a futile gesture, but for a purpose. He died to save us from our sin, and to snatch us out of the clutches of Satan and out of the jaws of hell, like burning sticks snatched out of a blazing bonfire.

And Jesus loved his enemies as he did his friends. He loved those who hated him, even as he loved those who followed him. At the end even his so called friends betrayed him, fled from him and denied him. ‘We were God’s enemies’ says Paul. That includes all of us. But Jesus’ love was the greatest love - he laid down his life for his enemies.

This day is the 70th anniversary of the bombing raid on Coventry that devastated the city and killed 600 people. We’ve also just marked the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, about which Churchill said:

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

I recently read the moving memoir of a Spitfire fighter pilot, and consequently have an even greater appreciation of the sacrifices that were made. But even the sacrifices of the few are overshadowed by the once for all sacrifice of the One.

Jesus died in order to turn his enemies into his friends. He died to liberate us from sin and death and hell.

One soldier recalled participating in the liberation of France following the Normandy landings:

... we found villagers and townspeople who clustered beside the road, waving and throwing flowers, and shouting words of encouragement as we sped by. If we paused for a moment’s respite, amidst our own sweat and dust, they would run to greet us, arms outstretched, with tears of joy streaming down their cheeks.

Jesus died to liberate us. On the cross he won the decisive victory. But the struggle continues. We need to see the reality of that continuing spiritual warfare amidst the peaceful prosperity that we take so much for granted. We need to accept that by nature we are enemies of Jesus. We’re on the wrong side. We need to see that Jesus has paid the price of our hostility. If you’re still his enemy, then believe that he died for you and become his friend today. If you’re already his friend, then ask yourself, ‘How does a friend of Jesus live?’

And that takes us on to the final point that needs to be made:


Thirdly, WE ARE FRIENDS OF JESUS IF WE LOVE AS HE DID.

That’s what Jesus is saying here in John’s Gospel. So he says in v14:

You are my friends if you do what I command.

And what is it that he commands? Verse 12 tells us:

My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.

Don’t misunderstand this. It’s not that we become friends of Jesus by loving like him. But when we become friends of Jesus, he changes us from within. We have a new nature. That new nature is like Jesus. It has his characteristics. It gives us the capacity for purposeful self-sacrifice.

Selfishness is still alive within us, even if it’s no longer at the very core of our being. There’s still a great struggle within us between self-centredness and our readiness for sacrificial service of others. We still have a lot to learn about living a life of the greatest love. It is the living friendship of Jesus, and the power of his Spirit within us, which enable us to do that.

A medical officer who closely observed the aircrews of Bomber Command came to the conclusion that we each have a finite stock of courage. The battle-hardened veteran was a mythical figure: sustained exposure to danger didn’t harden a soldier but eroded his limited resources. What armed forces needed was a system of rotation in and out of battle which eked out that stock of courage. Our resources of the greatest love are indeed severely limited, if not non-existent. But the resources of Jesus are unlimited. If we are to live and love like him, we need to be drawing on his resources and not relying on our own.

The missionary to China in the last century, Hudson Taylor, learned what it meant to draw on the love of Jesus so that he could go on living for others. He wrote:

At home you can never know what it is to be alone - absolutely alone, amidst thousands, without one friend, one companion, everyone looking on you with curiosity, with contempt, with suspicion or with dislike. Thus to learn what it is to be despised and rejected of man - of those you wish to benefit, your motives not understood but suspected - thus to learn what it is to have nowhere to lay your head; and then to have the love of Jesus applied to your heart by the Holy Spirit - His holy, self-denying love, which led Him to suffer this and more than this - for me this is precious, this is worth coming for.

We need to fight against the selfishness that persists within us. Again and again we must commit ourselves to lives of purposeful self-sacrifice for the sake of others. And we need to know that we can only live like that if we stay close to Jesus - depending on him, trusting him, drawing strength from him. Jesus says earlier in this chapter:

I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.

Sustaining a life of daily giving to others is in some ways as difficult as being ready literally to die. I remember years ago talking to a very old man called Herbert Jenkinson, shortly before he died. In his last years he was a member of this church. In his late teens he’d fought in the trenches of the First World War. Later, for many decades, he’d been a missionary in Africa. I imagined that as he looked back over his life, it would be that time in the blood soaked fields of France that would stand out for him as his toughest experience. Not so. It was the struggles of serving Christ as a missionary once the first flush of youthful zeal had passed that he recalled as the greatest challenge of his life.

Age does not weary those who have died, but we who live easily grow weary. The 19th century social reformer Lord Shaftesbury worked tirelessly to improve the conditions of the poor. He was motivated by his faith in Christ. As an elderly man he said once to a close friend:

If I followed my own inclination I would sit in my armchair and take it easy for the rest of my life. But I dare not do it. I must work as long as life lasts.

The greatest love is to lay down your life for your friends. Jesus laid down his life for his enemies. We are his friends, he says, if we love as he did - laying down our lives for others. It’s possible that one or more of us here this morning may literally be called upon to die for the sake of Christ. Each of us must reckon with that possibility. All of us are called upon to love like Jesus, in his strength, day in and day out, until there is no more breath in our bodies.

Will we lay down our lives for Jesus? Will we lay down our lives for our friends? Will we lay down our lives for the enemies of Jesus? Because Jesus has laid down his life for us.