To The Uttermost

John 13:1

March 6, 2022 • Mount Pleasant UMC

Asbury Seminary, many of you know, is located in the thriving metropolis of Wilmore, Kentucky. We loved the time we lived there, in our three-room apartment (which was an upgrade from the two-room apartment we started with), but when someone asks me where Wilmore is, I usually reply with some smart aleck remark like, “Well, it’s not the end of the world, but you can see it from there.” I say that because it’s true. Just a few miles down the road from Wilmore is the even smaller town of High Bridge, Kentucky, so named because, well, there’s a high train bridge that runs over the Kentucky River. You’re not supposed to climb up on the bridge, but come on, you know everyone’s going to. When I was there, the fence around it had been permanently bent back, leaving just enough room for intrepid seminary students to squeeze through. Anyway, enough confession of my sins. The road from Wilmore literally ended in High Bridge. There was no where else to go. At least in that part of the world, it was the end. When we went to High Bridge, we traveled to the uttermost of that part of Jessamine County.

What does it mean to go “to the uttermost”? More importantly, and more pertinent to our text this morning, what does it mean to love “to the uttermost”? This morning, we’re going to back up a bit in the Scriptures from where we were on Ash Wednesday. This Lenten season, we’re journeying with Jesus through the hours of the last night he spent with his disciples as John tells it. John, we know, was an eyewitness; he was there. He heard these last teachings Jesus gave before the cross. And so this Lenten season, we’re going to try to listen very carefully to what Jesus has to say and pay close attention to what he is doing—because when you know the end is near, as Jesus did, you focus on the things that are most important. You don’t have time to dwell on insignificant trivialities. You want to use the time for the things that matter, and for Jesus, according to John, that meant loving his disciples well, loving them “to the uttermost.”

Jesus comes to Jerusalem on what we call Palm Sunday back in chapter 12, and John really doesn’t pay much attention to the rest of the week because by the opening words of chapter 13, we are at Thursday evening. “It was just before the Passover Festival,” John says. Well, wait a minute, I’ve always been told that the Last Supper, the meal Jesus shared with his disciples, was a Passover meal, a meal that remembers and commemorates the time the Israelites were rescued from slavery in Egypt by Moses (and God). But John says it was “just before” the festival. There are a couple of possibilities for this. First of all, Jesus knew that by the next night, he would be in a tomb but, as he tells them in Luke’s gospel: “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer” (Luke 22:15). But eating it a day early also went with what most of these disciples were used to doing. There was a tradition in Galilee, in the northern part of the country, in which Passover was celebrated on Thursday night instead of Friday. But because they’re in Jerusalem, there is no lamb available for their meal; the lambs would be sacrificed on Friday afternoon, at the same time that Jesus, the lamb of God, was hanging on the cross (cf. Card, John: The Gospel of Wisdom, pg. 152). So they are celebrating Passover, but not on Passover.

That’s the first reference in time that John gives us; the second is a little more difficult to pin down. It’s Jesus’ “time,” and he knows it. John puts it this way: “Jesus knew that the hour had come for him to leave this world and go to the Father.” Many times on John’s Gospel, things either happen or don’t happen because it wasn’t the right time; Jesus’ “hour” had not yet come. But now, Jesus knows, the moment is upon him to do what he has come to do. It’s interesting for me to think about the thirteen men (and probably others) in that Upper Room, and how twelve of them had no idea it was the final night for them all to be together. Only Jesus knew.

It’s important to remember the context in which John is writing. It’s near the end of the first century, and John is an old man. He is, we believe, the last surviving member of the original twelve disciples, and he’s had a lifetime to preach and reflect and pray about the impact and meaning of Jesus’ life on himself and on the world at large. That’s why, I believe, the word “love” is so important to John. It shows up again and again throughout these chapters, but it is most prominent when he writes about this final night. It shows up thirty-one times in chapters 13-17, almost six times more than it did in chapters 1-12 (cf. Whitacre, John [IVPNTC], pg. 327). For John, nothing summed up what Jesus said and did than “love.” The word there is agape—no strings attached love. And when John remembers what happened with Jesus in that upper room that night, he can’t help but sum it up with these words: “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”

Most of us have probably, at one time or another, ended up at a funeral home or at a memorial service when someone has passed from this life to the next. Either it’s been someone you knew, or maybe you were the family of the one who died. It’s always a difficult time, and I’ve had people tell me that they don’t know what to say. But you know what? In those times when I have been on the “family” side of things, I can’t tell you a single thing anyone said. I don’t remember the words. What I do remember is that they showed up. In some cases, people made a real effort, traveled long distances, and they showed up. It’s not the words they spoke that mattered; it’s their presence and the kind and loving acts. In many ways, that’s what happens in this Upper Room. For the last three years, Jesus has shared a lot of words with these friends of his. In the hours to come, he will share a few more. But here, in the solitude of this Passover meal, “Jesus finally gives up on words” (Card 152) and shows them instead what love looks like. It’s a demonstration, a lived-out parable, that will literally last the rest of his life.

Here’s something I want you to notice: what’s happening when John says Jesus loved them “to the end”? I think usually in our minds, because we know the rest of the story, we hurry on to the cross and we say, “Look, there’s the demonstration of Jesus’ love, when he gave his life for us.” And yes, Jesus is demonstrating his love there, but that’s not where it begins. According to John, he demonstrates the “full extent” of his love here, in the Upper Room, early on in that final night, before the cross. He loves them to the uttermost as he kneels down and washes their feet, as he does for them what no one else would do, what they would not do for each other. He loves them to the uttermost as he tells them hard truth, that one of them is going to betray him. He loves them to the uttermost as he gives Judas one last chance to turn back toward the light. As he looks Judas in the eye, as I said on Wednesday night, he doesn’t affirm what Judas is doing, but he gives him the freedom to do it. He doesn’t affirm sinful behavior. He doesn’t cause it. In fact, he always provides a way out. “Whatever you’re going to do, do it quickly.” He loves them to the uttermost as he comforts them, as he teaches them hard truth (like, “No one comes to the Father except through me,” 14:6), as he walks with them to the Garden, and as he promises the arrival of the Holy Spirit. There are so many ways on this final night Jesus shows his unending and incomprehensible love for these disciples of his. In fact, Tom Wright says, “There was nothing that love could do for them that he did not do now” (Wright, John for Everyone—Part Two, pg. 45).

Which means, in general, we have the wrong idea about and the wrong definition of “love.” We hear that “Love is what makes the world go ‘round” and that “All you need is love.” But we don’t, as a culture, really have any idea what “love” is. At a base level, we equate “love” with sex, and more and more, we assume that loving someone means we allow them to do whatever they want. We’ve lived so long with the idea that love means you don’t tell someone “no” and you don’t do anything to hurt their feelings that we are now living with the fallout of that worldview. The only “loving” response to anyone, we’re told, is to accept and affirm whatever they say or do, and if you say “no” or put a boundary in place, then you’re a bigot or a hater. And I’m not just talking about issues around sexuality, though it’s certainly true there. But you see the same mindset in business, which is how we end up with scandals where companies fall apart because their leaders were less than honest. We have the wrong definition of love.

When I meet with couples preparing for a wedding, I will usually remind them that while there is a lot of effort, energy and money (!) being expended for the ceremony, that’s not the most important part. The saying goes that a wedding is a day, but a marriage is a lifetime. And while couples who approach the altar are head over heels in love at that moment, what they are experiencing right then is a feeling, a warm fuzzy feeling. It’s a great feeling, no doubt about it, but we all know feelings don’t last. As anyone who has been married any length of time knows, feelings do not last. You have to have something stronger than feelings to build a life upon. When our definition of love is “warm, fuzzy feelings,” we have the wrong definition.

In fact, nothing could be further from Jesus’ mind when he wants to love his disciples “to the uttermost.” Love is not found in what we feel, and it’s not found in what we say. Love is shown and experienced in the way we live toward others. It’s shown in a spouse who takes the “for better or for worse” vow seriously, standing by and providing the best for the one they have loved, even when it gets really “worse.” It’s shown when a businessperson does the right thing even though it’s going to cost him or her. It’s shown when a parent looks into the eyes of that newborn baby and whispers, “I would give my life for you.” It’s shown when a friend stands up for one who has been bullied by life and says, “No more. Injustice will not win.” And it’s known when you say to your friend who is hurting themselves, “I love you but I can’t allow you to keep going down this road, I can’t watch you harm yourself any longer.” When we walk in the footsteps of Jesus, we love others the way he has loved us—to the uttermost.

John Wesley believed that God had raised up the people called Methodist for one main purpose: “to spread Scriptural holiness across these lands.” And his understanding of “Scriptural holiness” could be boiled down to one short phrase: “love excluding sin” (Watson, Perfect Love, pg. 57). Wesley believed that when we become a Christian, God begins working in our lives helping us to learn to love God and love others so much that we won’t want to sin, we won’t want to break any of those relationships. Not that we won’t be capable of sinning, but we won’t want to anymore. When we experience the love of God to the uttermost, we will want to live love. Everything else in the spiritual life paled, Wesley said, compared to love. Visions, revelations, spiritual gifts—all of it is important, but not nearly as important as love, “the highest gift of God.” Listen to the way he talks about it:

The heaven of heavens is love. There is nothing higher in religion; there is, in effect, nothing else; if you look for anything but more love, you are looking wide of the mark, you are getting out of the royal way. And when you are asking others, “Have you received this or that blessing?” if you mean anything but more love, you mean wrong; you are leading them out of the way, and putting them [on] a false scent. Settle it then in your heart, that from the moment God has saved you from all sin, you are to aim at nothing more but more of that love described in the thirteenth [chapter] of [First] Corinthians. You can go no higher than this (qtd. in Watson xxv-xxvi).

So let me come back to the question I asked at the beginning this morning: what does it mean to love “to the uttermost”? That phrase is rendered a variety of ways in different Bible translations. He showed them “the full extent” of his love. He loved them “to the last.” The NIV that we read this morning says he loved them “to the end.” None of those translations are bad ones because all of that meaning is wrapped up in the wording John uses. “Love is the laying down of one’s life, and therefore to love completely means to love to the end of one’s life” (Whitacre 327). Jesus will put it this way in an upcoming chapter: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).

That word “friends” is very interesting, by the way, because we don’t usually think of “friends” as people we might die for. Jesus, of course, defined “friends” in a very particular way: “You are my friends if you do what I command” (John 15:14). And yet he washed the feet of everyone at the table, including Judas who was not going to do what Jesus commanded, who was going to betray Jesus. And yet he died for every single person on Earth, even those who would reject him. He still showed them love to the uttermost. The Apostle Paul understood the struggle we have with this. In his letter to the Romans, he’s wrestling with this idea of ultimate love. He writes, “Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die.” And then here’s the kicker for Paul and for us: “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:7-8). While we were pushing back against God’s best for us. While we, like Judas, were choosing to betray him. While we were anything but a friend to Jesus. While we were still far from him, he chose to love us, and he loved the disciples, and you and me, to the uttermost. Why would he do that?

Because he’s God, and as John will later write, “God is love” (1 John 4:16). It’s not that God loves. It’s that God is love. It’s who he is. He can’t do anything else but love us—to the uttermost. He loves each and every person so very much that, as the saying goes, he would rather die than live without us. If we really understood the degree to which God loves us, the permanence of God’s love, how far he was and is willing to go to bring us back to himself, we couldn’t begin to comprehend it. It would literally blow our minds (cf. Dunnam, With Jesus in the Upper Room, pg. 4). That’s why Paul writes, “I pray that you…may have power…to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge” (Ephesians 3:17-19). What if we could fully know the ways by which he loves us to the uttermost?

We catch glimpses of it from time to time. We get hints. We see it when a family changes their lifestyle and gives up so much to care for an elderly relative. We see it when a distinguished scholar gives up the position he had worked all his life for in order to care for his ailing wife, saying, “She took care of me all these years; now it’s my turn.” We see it when a parent will go to the ends of the earth to fight for the health and well-being of their child. We see it when someone reaches across the lines—whatever line it is, racial, denominational, political—and embraces someone they once thought was an enemy, or when two people agree to shake hands and remain friends despite their differences. And we see it when believers run toward the place of danger, when missionaries stay behind in a place like Ukraine so that the people there will know they are not forgotten. That is, you know, how early Christians were known. When plagues infested Roman cities, as they regularly did, the Christians were the ones who stayed behind. The wealthy left for their summer homes, and the Christians cared for the sick and the dying in the cities. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35). “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matthew 22:37-40). We get glimpses of love that goes to the uttermost.

And we catch a glimpse of it on days like this when we come to the communion table. It was at the table that Jesus showed his love “to the uttermost,” not only in what he said, not only by washing their feet, but by sharing the meal with them. Jesus took a meal they knew very well, a meal and a liturgy they had celebrated every year of their lives, and he infused new meaning into it. He took what was familiar and used it to remind them of the depth and height and width and length of his love for them (cf. Ephesians 3:18). God forbid that this practice we call holy communion every becomes rote or routine for us. Every time we come to this table, we should be anticipating a glimpse of the glory and the love of God for us. This bread, his body. This cup, his blood. This celebration, showing us he loves us and this whole weary world to the uttermost. May we never take it for granted. Will you pray with me as we prepare our hearts and lives for this glimpse of glory that we call holy communion?