'Love one another.' The newness of the precept is realised, if we think
for a moment of the new phenomenon which obedience to it produced. When
the words were spoken, the then-known civilised Western world was cleft
by great, deep gulfs of separation, like the crevasses in a glacier, by
the side of which our racial animosities and class differences are
merely superficial cracks on the surface. Language, religion, national
animosities, differences of condition, and saddest of all, difference
of sex, split the world up into alien fragments. A 'stranger' and an
'enemy' were expressed in one language, by the same word. The learned
and the unlearned, the slave and his master, the barbarian and the
Greek, the man and the woman, stood on opposite sides of the gulfs,
flinging hostility across. A Jewish peasant wandered up and down for
three years in His own little country, which was the very focus of
narrowness and separation and hostility, as the Roman historian felt
when he called the Jews the 'haters of the human race'; He gathered a
few disciples, and He was crucified by a contemptuous Roman governor,
who thought that the life of one fanatical Jew was a small price to pay
for popularity with his troublesome subjects, and in a generation
after, the clefts were being bridged and all over the Empire a strange
new sense of unity was being breathed, and 'Barbarian, Scythian, bond
and free,' male and female, Jew and Greek, learned and ignorant,
clasped hands and sat down at one table, and felt themselves 'all one
in Christ Jesus.' They were ready to break all other bonds, and to
yield to the uniting forces that streamed out from His Cross. There
never had been anything like it. No wonder that the world began to
babble about sorcery, and conspiracies, and complicity in unnameable
vices. It was only that the disciples were obeying the 'new
commandment,' and a new thing had come into the world—a community held
together by love and not by geographical accidents or linguistic
affinities, or the iron fetters of the conqueror. You sow the seed in
furrows separated by ridges, and the ground is seamed, but when the
seed springs the ridges are hidden, no division appears, and as far as
the eye can reach, the cornfield stretches, rippling in unbroken waves
of gold. The new commandment made a new thing, and the world wondered.
Now then, brethren, do not let us forget that, although to obey this
commandment is in some respects a great deal harder to-day than it was
then, the diverse circumstances in which Christian individuals and
Christian communities are this day placed may modify the form of our
obedience, but do not in the smallest degree weaken the obligation, for
the individual Christian and for societies of Christians, to follow
this commandment. The multiplication of numbers, the cessation of the
armed hostility of the world, the great varieties in intellectual
position in regard to the truths of Christianity, divergencies of
culture, and many other things, are separating forces, But our
Christianity is worth very little, if it cannot master these separating
tendencies, even as in the early days of freshness, the Christianity
that sprang in these new converts' minds mastered the far more powerful
separating tendencies with which they had to contend.
Every Christian man is under the obligation to recognise his kindred
with every other Christian man—his kindred in the deep foundations of
his spiritual being, which are far deeper, and ought to be far more
operative in drawing together, than the superficial differences of
culture or opinion or the like, which may part us. The bond that holds
Christian men together is their common relation to the one Lord, and
that ought to influence their attitude to one another. You say I am
talking commonplaces. Yes; and the condition of Christianity this day
is the sad and tragical sign that the commonplaces need to be talked
about, till they are rubbed into the conscience of the Church as they
never have been before.
Do not let us suppose that Christian love is mere sentiment. I shall
have to speak a word or two about that presently, but I would fain lift
the whole subject, if I can, out of the region of mere unctuous words
and gush of half-feigned emotion, which mean nothing, and would make
you feel that it is a very practical commandment, gripping us hard,
when our Lord says to us, 'Love one another.'
I have spoken about the accidental conditions which make obedience to
this commandment difficult. The real reason which makes the obedience
to it difficult is the slackness of our own hold on the Centre. In the
measure in which we are filled with Jesus Christ, in that measure will
that expression of His spirit and His life become natural to us. Every
Christian has affinities with every other Christian, in the depths of
his being, so as that he is a great deal more like his brother, who is
possessor of 'like precious faith,' however unlike the two may be in
outlook, in idiosyncrasy, and culture and in creed, than he is to
another man with whom he may have a far closer sympathy in all these
matters than he has with the brother in question, but from whom he is
parted by this, that the one trusts and loves and obeys Jesus Christ,
and the other does not. So, for individuals and for churches, the
commandment takes this shape—Go down to the depths and you will find
that you are closer to the Christian man or community which seems
furthest from you, than you are to the non-Christian who seems nearest
to you. Therefore, let your love follow your kinship, and your heart
recognise the oneness that knits you together. That is a revolutionary
commandment; what would become of our present organisations of
Christianity if it were obeyed? That is a revolutionary commandment;
what would become of our individual relations to the whole family who,
in every place, and in many tongues, and with many creeds, call on
Jesus as on their Lord, their Lord and ours, if it were obeyed? I leave
you to answer the question. Only I say the commandment has for its
first scope all who, in every place, love the Lord Jesus Christ.
But there is more than that involved in it. The very same principle
which makes this love to one another imperative upon all disciples,
makes it equally imperative upon every follower of Jesus Christ to
embrace in a real affection all whom Jesus so loved as to die for them.
If I am to love a Christian man because he and I love Christ, I am to
love everybody, because Christ loves me and everybody, and because He
died on the Cross for me and for all men. And so one of the other
Apostles, or, at least, the letter which goes by his name, laid hold on
the true connection when, instead of concentrating Christian affection
on the Church, and letting the world go to the devil as an alien thing,
he said: 'Add to your faith,' this, that, and the other, and 'brotherly
kindness, and to brotherly kindness, charity.' The particular does not
exclude the general, it leads to the general. The fire kindled upon the
hearth gives warmth to all the chamber. The circles are concentric, and
the widest sweep is struck from the same middle point as the narrow. So
the new commandment does not cut humanity into two halves, but gathers
all diversity into one, and spreads the great reconciling of Christian
love over all the antagonisms and oppositions of earth. Let me ask you
to notice—