The New Commandment

This is a copy of my talk given at Ayia Kyriaki and Saint Stephen’s in the Anglican Church of Paphos on Sunday 18 May 2025. The Bible reading was John 13:31-35.

---

Prayer

Heavenly Father,
I thank You for Your word.
By the power of Your Holy Spirit,
May You speak to my heart,
And change my life.
In the precious name of Jesus I pray.
Amen.

Introduction
Do you remember, as a child, ever wanting to be like someone else? Perhaps you wanted to be a fireman, or a Doctor or an Actor? I remember wanting to be a Train Driver (Casey Jones). I also wanted to be an astronaut; lift the FA Cup for Sunderland; Captain the English Rugby Union team. I never had any ambitions to be a priest! Who does? It’s possible our aspirations changed because those people we once looked up to may not have been as ‘perfect’ as we once thought they were. We saw their flaws and have found them wanting. I guess most of us no longer strive to be like other people.

Jesus offers us a chance to go back to those days of childhood innocence by giving us an opportunity to model our lives on someone we admire. And this individual has no flaws to create future disinterest along the way. When we consider Jesus’ character, personality and attributes, surely, he is the only one who is worthy of our emulation? Jesus invites us to be more like Him when he said: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.”

Love is a word that is always on people’s lips: there are more songs sung about it, poems written about it, and escapist books romanticising about it than any other subject in the world – apart from Jesus, that is.

The Beatles sang: All you need is love … and love, in the words of the Michael Ball song: changes everything. It seems to me that the world agrees that more love is exactly what we need to solve our problems.

I often wonder if we use the word ‘love’ too easily, after all, love for a place, a love of music, love for one’s children, and love for one’s partner are all quite different. For example, I can say that I love Paula and then I can say that I love fish and chips. Does that mean that I love Paula the same way I love fish and chips?  Of course not. The English language is so limiting at times. The word love in the Bible has many different meanings:  Eros – Sexual love, Storge – Parental love for children, Phileo – Friendship, Agape – God’s ‘unconditional’ love.

Love permeates through the whole of society, but it’s a love that has completely missed the mark.  And yet, all the terrible array of evil that haunts and sickens us today, would disappear if we could teach people to Love one another. All the ugliness, child abuse, people trafficking, broken marriages, violent crime and warfare that destroys the lives of so many people in our world today.

We can’t love in our own strength
Love one another … while it’s good advice, it’s not always easy to carry out, is it. We are all realists, and we all know how difficult it is to love unlovely people. We need God’s grace on a daily basis to give us the strength we need to live and to love. Here is how one Christian writer described his problem in this area:

Loving people is about the most difficult thing that some of us do. We can be patient with people and even just and charitable, but how are we supposed to conjure up in our hearts that warm, effervescent sentiment of goodwill, which the New Testament calls “love”?

Some people are so miserably unlovable. That odorous person with the nasty cough who sat next to you in the train, shoving his newspaper into your face, those crude louts in the neighbourhood with the barking dog, that smooth liar who took you in so completely last week – by what magic are you supposed to feel toward these people anything but revulsion, distrust and resentment, and justified desire to have nothing to do with them?

But … when Jesus comes into our lives, we receive the Holy Spirit and through this, God enables us to be a different kind of person. He provides us with a new kind of love, the purest, deepest kind of love imaginable. We love, not in our strength, but in the strength that comes from God. It’s a fruit of the Spirit.

Jesus’ love was without respect of persons.
He didn’t love people who were nice to love, as we do. He chose to love the unlovely: people who were rejected, difficult to love, looked down upon, held in contempt by society. He loved them, not because he wanted the good feeling of love, but simply because they needed loving. This is the characteristic of his love. It goes out to people who need love regardless of what they are like, no matter how dirty, leprous, hurtful, proud or arrogant they may be. It goes out because they need love.

Most psychologists agree that the greatest need of men and women is to love and be loved. A BBC survey confirms this when it found that 78% of people would rather be loved than have money in the bank!

Jesus’ love was expressed in deeds, not just words.
It’s often said that love is a verb. And, if you remember your English language from school, you’ll know that a verb is a doing word. And so, love isn’t a feeling or an experience (though, admittedly, it’s both of those) it’s what we do to/for others that shows how much we love. To practise love is to reflect the character and concerns of God as he has shown to us in and through Jesus.

Love is expressed in deeds not just words. Remember what Jesus said in Matthew 25:34-35, when the sheep and goats are separated: “Enter into the kingdom that has been prepared, because when I was sick you visited me, when I was hungry you fed me, and when I was naked you clothed me…”

But that’s not always the case. There will always be heartaches and disappointments in the church. Why? Because the church is full of people who make mistakes and get things wrong. However, and I know this isn’t always easy, I’ve always said that if my faith was built on people I would have given up a long time ago. But it isn’t.  It’s built on Jesus. And sometimes; we need to keep that in perspective. But that’s no excuse for bad behaviour one to another and no excuse for not aspiring to be better. Yes, sometimes believers will hurt us and disappoint us deeply, and no doubt we will disappoint them too, but the Lord, who doesn’t give up on us, calls us not to give up on one another.

Pope Leo XIV: I don’t come to offer you perfect faith. I come to tell you that faith is a walk with stones, puddles, and unexpected hugs … So, if you’re broken … if you’re tired of the lies … I’m asking you not to close the door. Give a chance to the God who gives rest for the weary.

In the late 1980s, Lieserl Einstein, the daughter of the famous genius, donated 1,400 letters, written by her father, to the Hebrew University, with orders not to publish their contents until two decades after his death. This is one of them:

For Lieserl Einstein.

When I proposed the theory of relativity, very few understood me, and what I will reveal now to transmit to mankind will also collide with the misunderstanding and prejudice in the world.

I ask you to guard the letters as long as necessary, years, decades, until society is advanced enough to accept what I will explain below.

There is an extremely powerful force that, so far, science has not found a formal explanation to. It is a force that includes and governs all others and is even behind any phenomenon operating in the universe and has not yet been identified by us.

This universal force is LOVE.

When scientists looked for a unified theory of the universe they forgot the most powerful unseen force.

Love is Light, that enlightens those who give and receive it. Love is gravity, because it makes some people feel attracted to others.

Love is power, because it multiplies the best we have, and allows humanity not to be extinguished in their blind selfishness. Love unfolds and reveals. For love we live and die. Love is God and God is Love.

This force explains everything and gives meaning to life. This is the variable that we have ignored for too long, maybe because we are afraid of love because it is the only energy in the universe that man has not learned to drive at will.

To give visibility to love, I made a simple substitution in my most famous equation. If instead of E = mc2, we accept that the energy to heal the world can be obtained through love multiplied by the speed of light squared, we arrive at the conclusion that love is the most powerful force there is, because it has no limits.

After the failure of humanity in the use and control of the other forces of the universe that have turned against us, it is urgent that we nourish ourselves with another kind of energy… If we want our species to survive, if we are to find meaning in life, if we want to save the world and every sentient being that inhabits it, love is the one and only answer.

Perhaps we are not yet ready to make a bomb of love, a device powerful enough to entirely destroy the hate, selfishness and greed that devastate the planet. However, each individual carries within them a small but powerful generator of love whose energy is waiting to be released.

When we learn to give and receive this universal energy, dear Lieserl, we will have affirmed that love conquers all, is able to transcend everything and anything, because love is the quintessence of life.

I deeply regret not having been able to express what is in my heart, which has quietly beaten for you all my life. Maybe it’s too late to apologize, but as time is relative, I need to tell you that I love you and thanks to you I have reached the ultimate answer! “.

Your father

Albert Einstein.

Conclusion
The Bible teaches that God’s love is endless, boundless and unconditional the love that cost the life of His son. And it is this same sacrificial, costly, unconditional, everlast­ing, inexhaustible, unchanging, overwhelming, supernatural love that Christians should show in their relationship with one another.

The greatest piece of literature ever written on the theme of love isn’t to be found in Shakespeare’s sonnets but in the Bible. The words of the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 13 are timeless. They are recognised as one of the greatest pieces of literature ever written on the theme of love, because of the eloquence and splendour of its language – despite the fact it is 2000 yrs. old. And whilst there are words are often read at weddings; they were written to the church community as the standard for community living.

I’m going to read a few verses and when I say the word love I want you to think of your own name – and this reading will take on a very different perspective.

Love is patient, love is kind. Love does not envy, love does not boast, love is not proud. Love does not dishonour others, love is not self-seeking, love is not easily angered, love keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. Love always protects, love always trusts, love always hopes, love always perseveres. Love never fails.

When Christians begin to act in this way, loving God with body, soul and spirit, loving our neighbours and our enemies, regardless of colour, race or class, then we will see society change for the better. The world may not always agree with us; they may not always come and join us – although many of them will – but they will know one thing: Such people have been with Jesus.

---

COPYRIGHT DISCLAIMER The text contained in this sermon (except where stated) is solely owned by its author, Revd Paul A. Carr. The reproduction, or distribution of this message, or any portion of it, should include the author’s name.