Homily: The Sixth Sunday of Easter [May 6, 2018] Trinity, Santa Barbara

            Over the course of my life I have read George Orwell’s classic novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, on four widely separate occasions. I first read it in 1964, my sophomore year in high school, for a book report. I next read it in 1984 because, well, it was 1984. I then read it after September 11, 2001 when the president and congress passed the Patriot Act and questions of terrorism and civil liberties were so prevalent. And I read it again recently because of all the assaults on truth and language we seem to be undergoing. Somehow today, the idea of a leader insisting that 2 + 2 = 5 doesn’t seem quite as farfetched as it once did.

            Every time you read a great book something new emerges for you. In high school I was particularly taken with George Orwell’s inventions of doublethink and the Thought Police. In the Reagan years I focused on the way allies and enemies kept changing places. In the Bush-Cheney era, with its continual assaults on language, George Orwell’s coining of the language called Newspeak (in which euphemisms abound) seemed most important. This time, something unexpected caught my eye.

            If you remember the plot of Nineteen Eighty-Four, you will remember that its protagonist, Winston Smith, is detained by the Thought Police and interrogated by a man known only as O’Brien. Smith has been found to have been harboring negative thoughts about Big Brother. Early on in their dialogue, Smith admits hating Big Brother. O’Brien says in reply,

You hate him. Good. Then the time has come for you to take the last step. You must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him: you must love him. 

What ensues, of course, is one of the most horrific episodes of brainwashing ever recorded. O’Brien finds the way in to Winston Smith’s deepest fears and gets him to betray the woman he loves. As the novel ends, Winston Smith’s mind has been changed. Here is how George Orwell describes Smith’s final epiphany:

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

            Now I will resist the temptation to make the obvious connection between Big Brother and other possible large national leaders we might think of who seem to exact loyalty in exchange for absolutely nothing. Instead, what struck me on this rereading of Nineteen Eighty-Four was its ironic connection to this morning’s gospel (John 15:9-17):

                  As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

            There are many things we might say about Jesus, but first among them today is that John’s gospel portrays him as the ultimate anti-Big Brother. On Maundy Thursday Jesus washes the disciples’ feet but does not ask that they wash his in return. Last week we heard Jesus describe himself as the vine and us as the branches. Today we hear Jesus commanding us to love one another. Big Brother demands that we love him. Jesus commands not that we love him but that we love one another.

            George Orwell’s Big Brother is not the first (and will certainly not be the last) leader in human history to demand love from his subjects. The political world in which Jesus lived and taught was dominated by Rome, whose official state cult made the emperor a god. In our social lives we have become habituated to dealing with leaders (usually political and religious authorities, sometimes even our bosses) who demand something more than mere loyalty: they demand personal adoration. These encounters begin with the transactional (“I will keep you safe and you will pay your taxes”) and then morph into the relational (“I give your life meaning and you will love me”). This slow creep from covenant to worship is one reason I have increasingly come to distrust charisma. There’s always a hidden price to pay. There’s always a dark side.

            But none of this is true for Jesus. To be sure, he does talk in the gospel reading about laying down his life for his friends, but even there he does not move to the obvious and logical Tony Soprano conclusion, “so you owe me big time”.  Jesus refers to his self-offering as an example of the depth of his love. And what he asks in return is neither obedience nor worship. What he asks in return is that we love one another as he has loved us.

            I think one of the reasons we spend not one day but fifty days celebrating Easter is that it takes a long time to take in just how countercultural the resurrection really is. I spent the last years of my professional life in Washington D.C., and I think one of the reasons Americans distrust our capital city is because it encapsulates all the worst transactional values of American culture. All relationships there are based on power and obligation. When I first went to D.C., people continually asked me how, having grown up in Hollywood, I was adjusting to Washington. “No problem,” I would say. “They’re both the same culture.”

            The resurrection of Jesus, which we celebrate in these fifty days of Easter, is the ultimate rebuke to a culture of power and obligation. Big Brother and Caesar demand unthinking obedience and fawning love. Jesus and the God he incarnates ask only that we love one another. The values of power and obligation always appear to be winning. The values of humility, justice, compassion, and peace always seem to lose. But the day and season of Easter suggest the way things really work. In George Orwell’s world, Big Brother will always prevail. In God’s world the humility, justice, compassion, and peace made real and present in Jesus eventually outlast the pretentious imperial forces that seek to crush them.

            In God’s universe, it is Jesus and those who care for others who prevail. And when all is said and done, our only obligation is to love our fellow human beings. We love God not vertically but horizontally. And as Reinhold Niebuhr reminds us, in the social realm, love must be more than a feeling. We love each other one way in a family, differently in a community. For those of us who seek to love one another socially, love must always be translated as justice.

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

            As followers of Jesus, you and I believe and hope that love and justice will ultimate prevail. As realists, we know that we must follow Jesus in a world dominated by the values of Caesar and Big Brother, Washington, and Hollywood.  On this Sixth Sunday of Easter, Jesus shows us how we can make our way through all the bad values and false loyalties that our culture tries to force upon us. We follow Jesus and become our real selves by loving and serving each other and the world.

            Every generation that reads George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four sees in its pages its own problems reflected back to it. Winston Smith’s tragedy lies in the way he is persuaded to love an authority figure instead of a fellow human being. In that novel’s world, there is tellingly no voice of Jesus to remind anyone of the priority God places on mutual human love.

            Patriarchy, hierarchy, and empire die hard. Even after centuries of Christian faith and practice, we Christians persist in thinking that God is more like a jealous emperor than a humble Palestinian Jewish peasant. After all these years, we still seem to think that God is some kind of narcissist who, like Big Brother, demands love without question. But if we really hear what Jesus is saying, we’ll find that it isn’t like that at all.

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

            Here is the good news: we do not yet inhabit the world of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. There is still room for us to hear these countercultural words of Jesus. We stand against empire whenever we choose to love people instead of power. May we continue to hear these words and live them out in our personal and social lives, and in so doing frustrate the narcissistic demands of all our various Big Brothers and of all systems that would alienate us from Jesus, each other, the world, and even ourselves. Amen.