"All true love is tethered to faith in Christ, the Word of God" Holy Thursday 2025
17. April 2025
Holy Thursday
John 13:1-13; 2 Peter 1:2-11 - Love
A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.” (Jn 13:34–35).
This is the Word of the Lord that came to me, so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing, you may have life in His + Name. AMEN.
During this Lenten season, we have learned many virtues God the Holy Spirit grants us to restrain the old Adam and his passions and lusts. Attached to the promised gift of “all things that pertain to life and godliness” is the blessing of participating in godliness and being fruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. Whether it is knowledge, self-control, godliness, endurance, brotherly kindness, or, today, love, these virtues (and more) preserve Christian faith toward God and ἀγάπη love for one another. Through the Spirit, the Apostle promises that those who are diligent in these virtues will never stumble and will enter into the eternal kingdom of Jesus, richly provided for you.
Let’s recap. Peter's first virtue or moral excellence is knowledge. This “knowing” includes the saving work of Christ. Christ’s suffering, death, and shedding of His blood for your forgiveness are God’s glory and virtue, the highest good. Through Christ Jesus, our Lord, you have everything you need for life and godliness.
The second virtue is self-control. We regard our lives as determined and directed by God’s Word. There is no place for self-mastery apart from God. The gift of salvation in Christ crucified gives the full and complete remission of sins, regeneration, and new obedience.
The third virtue is endurance. We rest confident and hopeful in God’s promise of deliverance, waiting for what we know will come. Without preaching and teaching, we fail to remain with God where He has promised to be. Steadfastness is less about the individual but about the entire community (e.g., God’s Israel) waiting for God’s covenant to be fulfilled.
The fourth virtue is, godliness, εὐσέβεια, an expression of respect or worship for God and what He has established. We are called to hold Christ and the orders He establishes in high esteem and avoid sinning against them. We sin against God when we sin against what or whom He has established. This is why we honor parents as God in God’s place. We revere preachers and teachers who deliver God’s Word to us. We respect civil rulers who are called to commend those who do well and discipline those who do wrong.
The fifth virtue is φιλαδελφία, brotherly kindness. It pertains to a physical brotherhood, that is, flesh and blood. And in a more general sense, it refers to affection for those of the spiritual brotherhood. Here, think of “fellow Christians” or “Christian brothers.”
And today we are called to a specific love, ἀγάπη, the love of God for us in Christ. This love is tethered, grounded, and rooted in the faith created by the Holy Spirit through the knowledge of salvation in Jesus. As Christ has fully and perfectly demonstrated selfless, sacrificial love, so those in Christ show the same toward one another. Later in the Second Epistle of Peter, this love is set in contrast to the loveless apostates, who fail to care for brothers and sisters in Christ but instead exploit them (2 Peter 2:1-18).
Christ’s call today to love, ἀγάπη, one another is set in contrast to the natural loves: storge (familial affection), eros (romantic or sexual love), and philia (love between friends). Last week, we considered brotherly kindness as it describes our love for one another in the Christian community. But as with all the virtues, ἀγάπη love, when untethered from Christ’s Word, becomes a vice, offense, and disgusting thing. Familial affection can be used to manipulate and control. Romantic love can be used as an excuse for fornication, adultery, sodomy, and the like. The love of friends can be used as an excuse to fail to confess the truth. The world tells us “love is love,” after all.
God’s law defines ἀγάπη love. To love God is to love your neighbor. Disordered love is centered on what I want or what my neighbors want, but not what God wants. Deformed love fails to act by what is good, beautiful, and true. Love is often set against the truth rather than confessing the truth. Love cannot be set against faith. Receiving Christ’s Word and believing it in faith are roots of the good tree that bears the fruit of love. Today, we see that ἀγάπη love manifests both with the washing of the disciples’ feet and the institution of the Lord’s Supper.
Jesus came into the world to bear the world's sins and lay down His life in death. This is how Jesus loved His own to the end, or to the fullest extent. He bore the burden of their sin, suffered, and died in their place on the cross. He is the only one who could have entered the Most Holy Place to make atonement for sin. This is what Jesus means when He speaks about going to the Father or returning to God.
And today, Jesus gives the ministry of love to the Church; that is, it is through the Office of the Holy Ministry that He gives His love to the Church. Jesus bathes His Church through Holy Baptism in which the sinner is made completely clean. The baptized have an ongoing need to be washed through applying the loving word of Holy Absolution. The work of the Holy Ministry, the work that Christ has done in laying down His life and forgiving sins, continues as the Gospel of God's grace is preached, sinners are called to repentance, repentant sinners are forgiven, and forgiveness is withheld from the unrepentant as long as they do not repent. This is the ministry of His ἀγάπη love. Whoever receives this ministry of love, through faith in the proclaimed forgiveness of sins, gets no one less than Christ Himself.
And having received this ἀγάπη love, we also ἀγάπη love on another. “As I have loved you, […] you also love one another.” Jesus loved us to the end, that is, He gave Himself willingly for the forgiveness of our sins. On the night He spoke these words, Jesus gathered His disciples and gave them the gift of love in His body and blood. Jesus calls all His disciples to gather in repentance around His altar to receive the marks of His love. Thus, in this Supper, we publicly confess the love Christ displayed in His death on our behalf. Here we are united in that love with those who confess this faith as we eat and drink for the forgiveness of sins. That love is poured into us and spills over from us to those around us in mutual love and forgiveness for Jesus’ sake.
You can’t help but hear St. John’s first epistle and its definitive teaching on ἀγάπη love. “7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. 9 In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. 10 In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. […] 17 Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness in the day of judgment; because as He is, so are we in this world. 18 There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment. But he who fears has not been made perfect in love. 19 We love Him because He first loved us. […] 20 If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? 21 And this commandment we have from Him: that he who loves God must love his brother also” (1 Jn 4:7ff).
Or consider St. Paul’s exposition, “1 Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. 2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing. 4 Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; 5 does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; 6 does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; 7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never fails. […] 13 And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Co 13:1–13).
All true love, be it for God, family, spouse, brothers, or neighbor, is tethered to faith in Christ, the Word of God. As Christ and His apostles Peter and Paul confess above, faith without love is dead. And as St. Peter’s lovely sermon taught us this Lent, ἀγάπη love without faith is aimless, ungrounded, and empty. Peter describes this gift of life in a series of virtues beginning with faith and ending with love. Faith in Christ is the foundation from which all the Christian virtues flow, and love is the culmination and “greatest” result of faith (1 Cor 13:13). Thus, we are given to speak of the sanctified life, established and founded upon God’s grace in Christ, from love received from God and lived in love for one another.
The superabundance of all the godly qualities makes you abundantly profitable and fruitful “with respect to the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 1:8). The godly virtues are not a means unto themselves, untethered from Jesus. First comes the justifying as the Spirit gives you saving knowledge, the gift of true faith in Christ. And then comes the sanctifying as the Spirit works the virtues of self-control, godliness, endurance, and brotherly affection, all that you both remain in the faith and live lovely lives to the glory of God.
Therefore, brethren, be even more diligent to make your call and election sure, for if you do these things you will never stumble; for so an entrance will be supplied to you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. (2 Pe 1:10–11)
This is the Word of the Lord that came to me, so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing, you may have life in His + Name. AMEN.
Rev. Christopher R. Gillespie
St. John Ev. Lutheran Church & School - Sherman Center
Random Lake, Wisconsin
