What is precious to us beyond measure?
The irony of being human is that what we treasure most we so often take for granted.
Is it the Church? Is the Church precious beyond measure?
Not the Church as in history and architecture and institution,
but Church as in people, the living body of believers who fumble about trying to follow Jesus
together.
Is the community of the Church something that we treasure beyond measure?
Jesus gives the New Commandment that we love one another as he loves us, the example being
his washing the disciple’s feet, a love that serves with tender devotion and humility.
We tend to lump this along with all the other words about love for neighbors and strangers and
whoever. We miss something important when we do that.
This commandment to love is for the disciples of Jesus to have tender love and devotion for each
other. This isn’t about humanity in general. This isn’t about outreach or mission. This is about
being the Church together. This is about what Gill Powel likes to call in-reach.
In John’s Gospel these are parting words from Jesus. They carry tremendous weight.
We don’t have to spend too much time with John’s Gospel and John’s three letters to see and feel
that this is was written by and for a community of believers who had suffered painful divisions in
their community. They knew from experience how fragile, precious and rare the gift is of being
in community in Jesus name.
Perhaps they had taken that community for granted and regretted how it was now missing in their
lives, they regret their complicity in its demise.
They send us a message, a gift, through time spoken from the tongue of Jesus to treasure the life
of being Church together above all else, to love one another with tender reverence.
The Church is entrusted with the treasure of the Gospel that is light and salvation for the world,
and the Gospel begins at home, that love begins at home in the body of believers, without that
foot washing tender devotion the Church isn’t the Church and there is no Gospel to live out, no
Gospel to share, no good news to proclaim.
The Church itself is the Gospel, and that community of love is light and salt and life to a world
that has lost the love.
The Church is the proclamation of the Gospel. Not the Church as in history and architecture and
institution, but Church as in people, the living body of believers who fumble about trying to
follow Jesus together.
Our love for one another, warts and all, is the message, the invitation and the medicine for what
ails us. It is precious beyond measure.
A community defined not by like-mindedness or appearance but by love for one another even on
the bad days.
And that love is God’s gift and God’s presence for the world; it is the chemistry by which
everything else happens.