A Testimony of Love–Part 3
February 12, 2023 § 1 Comment
Why a testimony of love?
The practical answer is that it’s hard to argue against love. Arguing against love, when it’s plainly and authentically expressed, makes you look bad; it makes you look angry, spiteful, and hateful. And love is a universal antidote for all kinds of poisons. It speaks to peace as well as it does to equality, to justice as well as it does to earthcare.
But we have much more important reasons to adopt a testimony of love. I see these three:
- Love is part of our DNA as a religious society—it’s embedded in our origins and in our identity and name as a movement; love is our indigenous language.
- Love, properly understood, is not about feelings; it’s about action—it’s a commandment.
- Love speaks directly out of our Christian and biblical tradition, and it speaks directly to those for whom these traditions carry authority—it builds a moral bridge.
Love and the Quaker identity
The Religious Society of Friends gets this name from the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of John, chapter 15, verses 12 to 17 (emphasis added):
This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know that the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.
John 15:12–17
So we Quakers are friends of Jesus on the condition that we love one another with a divine love, with the love God has shown to us, and with the promise that in this friendship, we will “know everything.” From this passage, Friends adopted our collective name, we embraced the promise of continuing revelation, we embraced the commandment of love, and we embraced our mission as a people of God—to “bear fruit that lasts”.
This love is a commandment. It is not a sentiment that arises out of good chemistry with another person; it is something we do, regardless of our feelings for another. It is something we do, even when we do not feel like it. It is something we do even when we least want to do it. We are even to love our enemies. This is who we claimed we were when we adopted the name Religious Society of Friends.
Luckily for us, this love is not just an act of will for which we must struggle alone. In the passage just preceding this one, Jesus says
I am the vine and my Father is the vinegrower. . . . Abide in me just as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.
John 15:1, 4–5
Taken together with verses 12 to 17, I read this message as follows: We live in a spiritual union or bonded “network” that includes each of us and the spirit of the Christ and the Holy Spirit of God, and this union’s job, this vine’s job, is to do good and lasting things in the world in a spirit of love, even when it’s very hard to do, and the Spirit will guide and strengthen us in this mission.
This is the platform on which we should build our efforts to bring the reign of God on earth as it is in the realm of the Spirit. And for guidance about what to do and how to do it, about what to say and how to say it, we should turn to the Holy Spirit that has been promised to us and which we do experience in the gathered meeting:
If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither seems him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.
John 14:15–17
Read part 4 here.
Through the Flaming Sword 
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