Greater Love

In the Gospel of John, chapter 15, Jesus is speaking to his disciples when he says in verses 12 & 13, “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.  Greater love has no man than this; that he lay down his life for his friends.” (NIV)  Later, in verse 17 he repeats himself saying, “This is my command: Love each other.”(NIV)  We might think that is all well and good for Jesus, after all he was Jesus.  Surely he was not saying that we have to be willing to die for our friends to prove that we can love the way he loved.  Or, was he?

Was Jesus speaking literally or figuratively?  Given what we know about his life, it would seem that Jesus was speaking about himself in literal terms.  He did lay down what appeared to be his physical life.  However, does this suggest that in order for us to truly love we must do the same?  And, when referring to his “friends” was he talking only about the disciples?  Who are our “friends” for whom we must be willing to lay down our lives in order to express the degree of love embodied by Jesus? An even more compelling question is, “Do we have the capacity to love so much that we would be willing to lay down our lives for anyone?” 

When explored figuratively, the “life” that we must be willing to lay down is the so-called “life” of the ego-dominated mind.  All of the stories we have created about who we are, who others are or are not, what we do, what we should do, and so on, constitute our so-called “life.”  This is what must die in order that we may express the unconditional Love to which Jesus referred.  We must allow the ego-identified self to die away so that we can fully live in the awareness of the Christ as Jesus did.  As Paul said in a letter to the church at Corinth, “I die daily.”  This “dying” occurs every time we release our limiting beliefs about ourselves and the world, and surrender to the Truth of who we are as expressions of the One Life of God.  When we realize that we are the One Life and embrace all others as that One Life as well, we awaken to Love, and we can consciously allow Love’s awareness to transform us at depth in order that we might fully express as Love.

Very often, if not always, the physical body is the concept of “life” to which we are most powerfully attached.  We believe that we experience life through the sensations of the body; therefore, without the body, we would not have life, or so we believe.  Thus, the thought of giving up the body is tantamount to death according to the ego-identified mind.  However, when we know who and what we truly are, we accept that we are not this body and that this temporal experience is just that, temporary and not the eternal expression of Life that we are.  This does not mean that we must experience physical death in order to know the kind of Love that Jesus was teaching, but it does mean that we must be willing to do so.  The willingness to move beyond the dream of reality that we call “life” is the freedom to experience the Life of God that is truly our Life.   Again, it is as Jesus said in John 8:32 (NIV), “You will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free.”  Knowing the Truth of who we are; knowing that we are eternal Life expressing and experiencing Itself, gives us the freedom to Love unconditionally now.  There is nothing to fear, not even death.

It would seem that in John 15, Jesus is referring to the disciples as his friends when he says, “I have called you my friends because everything I have learned from my Father I have made known to you.” (NIV)  So, when read literally, it appears that Jesus is saying that the greatest love he can show is to lay down his life for the disciples.  However, when we look at this metaphysically with the aid of Charles Fillmore, the co-founder of Unity, we can see that the disciples represent many things, including what Fillmore refers to as the Twelve Powers of Man, or the twelve faculties of man.  In the beginning of his ministry, when Jesus called the twelve to come with him they were ignorant of the law of Love and the ways of the “Father,” thus they were Jesus’ students and “servants” as he refers to them.  At this point in John’s narrative, Jesus has taught the disciples all he had “learned from the Father,” meaning that he had developed them in spiritual understanding.  They were no longer his “servants,” but ready to serve with him in Love.  The disciples or “friends” represent the faculties that have been transformed.  From this perspective “friends” does not refer to our buddies or pals, but to the developed faculties of the Christ that each of us embodies as potential. Each of us is an expression of the full potential of the Christ, the Self that Jesus fully realized and embodied; thus, each of us has the potential to express the Love of Christ just as Jesus did.  In order to realize this Truth and reveal this Truth, we must “die” to the false image of the “self” in service to our greater awareness of our true Self.

Perhaps the English translation, “Greater love has no man than this; that he lay down his life for his friends” is not quite correct.   The following could be a more direct translation, “Man cannot know greater love until he lays down his life for his friends.”  We will know the greatest Love when we are willing to die to the ego-dominated “life” including the illusion of the body, and awaken to and live from the realized Christ potential.

That is a command worth living.